Date: 2006-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: THIRTEEN SPECIMENS is a collection of bizarre and disturbing short stories, poems, and odd bits and pieces found preserved in dusty jars of formaldehyde in a sealed-off attic room in the condemned museum of the mind of author Jeffrey Thomas. Included are the novellas "The Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism" and "Door 7," as well as a trio of powerful stories that -- for the first time in one collection -- visit the three fictional universes that Thomas is best known for. "Close Enough" takes place in the alternate Earth of the novel "Boneland. " A sadistic, otherworldly force feeds off the n
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing

Thirteen Specimens

Jeffrey Thomas

Copyright © 2014 Jeffrey Thomas

All rights reserved.

Thirteen Specimens was originally published as a limited edition hardcover (2006) and trade paperback (2008) by Delirium Books.

Cover photo by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 1499541252

ISBN-13: 978-1499541250

PUBLICATION CREDITS:

“These Are The Exhibits” was originally published as a signed, limited edition of 100 “chapettes” by Camelot Books and Gifts, 2003.

“American Cchinnamasta” first appeared in the e-book Of Flesh and Hunger, Double Dragon Publishing, 2003.

All other work is original to this collection.

CONTENTS

1. These Are The Exhibits (a tour)

2. Titles of Poems Not Written (a poem)

3. Close Enough (a photograph)

4. Sympathetic Identity Disorder (a diagnosis)

5. American Cchinnamasta (a goddess)

6. Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Women (a list)

7. Monsters (an alien)

8. October 32nd
(a ride)

9. The Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism (a travelogue)

10. Scared Shirtless (a t-shirt design)

11. The Burning House (an afterlife)

12. On Making Clam Chowder (a recipe)

13. Door 7 (an ending)

These Are The Exhibits

The contrast between the glare of winter without and the grotto-like darkness of the museum’s small foyer caused Clara to pause several steps within until her eyes could acclimate. In addition, the wind outside had been so assaultive that, as Clara had walked against it, tears had streamed horizontally from her eyes. She felt slightly disoriented and half blind, until her surroundings found their focus.

The room was circular, with several doorways branching off from it, one apparently leading into a gift shop, and with murky oils of unfamiliar personages bolted into the spaces between them. In a recessed area like a display herself, a woman sat at a wooden counter, her face under-lit as she read from a magazine. Not until Clara stood directly before her did she look up.

“Welcome to the Stewart Museum,” the woman said. A price of admission was given, and paid. During the exchange the woman asked, “Have you been here before?” When Clara said she hadn’t, the woman indicated several receptacles in the front of the desk. “There is a map to the various floors, and a guide to the displays.”

Clara thanked her, but did not take either the map sheet or guidebook. She had never found herself referring to such materials on her visits to other museums. Instead, she walked toward the door that faced opposite the main entrance, guided only by a placard with an arrow and the one word: EXHIBITS.

She found herself in a long, wide gallery with a high ceiling. The balconies of several upper levels ringed it. The overall lighting was muted, with spotlights illuminating the various displays. As she had stepped into the great hall, Clara had immediately been drawn to a large glass showcase only several paces away, in which was mounted the mummified remains of perhaps an antelope, with graceful spiraled horns.

Standing more directly in front of the showcase with its aquarium-like glow, she looked about the sides and bottom for a plaque that might describe the creature. There was none. She realized it would have been wise to have accepted one of the laminated guidebooks after all.

Clara turned her head to watch a young man in a striking red jacket stroll toward her, smiling. She hadn’t noticed him peripherally until he was only a short distance away.

“Is this your first visit to the Stewart Museum?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yes,” Clara told him. “I’m in the city on a business trip.”

“Ahh.” Standing beside her, he turned to face into the showcase, its light heightening the color of his jacket, glowing on his face and reflecting brightly in his eyes. “This animal was a gift from Gardner Stewart to his fiancé Isabella Reyes in 1886. He shot it himself while on a hunting trip to the country of Bonsu. The technique used to preserve it was experimental for the times, and as you can see it hasn’t fared well over the years. This is a male of the species. The female, somewhat smaller, has wings rather like those of a vulture in appearance.”

“Really? How interesting.”

“Stewart wrote home to Isabella, describing the sight of those delicate animals flapping across the tropical sunsets. He once saw another hunter shoot one of them down, described how it kicked and spasmed in its final throes. He told Isabella that it was one of the most tragic things he had ever witnessed.”

“But did the lack of wings make this specimen’s death any less horrible?” she asked.

The man smiled at her. “Mr. Stewart was a man of contrasts and complexity. The owner of a highly successful firearms manufacturing plant, who collected books of poetry. A man of varied and exotic tastes. This museum was created in his final decade, primarily as a tribute to his wife Isabella. Its contents, grouped in no particular order, consist of the gifts he sent her from around the world in his many travels.”

The red-jacketed man began to drift onwards slowly, and Clara found herself drifting along beside him. He was already pointing out another display case to her, and they took their position before it.

“Isabella had a passionate interest in nature, and that accounts for the great number of botanical and especially biological specimens in the collection.” There was an plaster cast of a woman’s head and upper chest in a case imbedded in the wall, the eyes white and unseeing. Around its slender throat it wore a string of round beads or stones, black with a silvery metallic sheen. “These are the pearls Isabella wore for her wedding, in 1888. Stewart gathered them himself along the coral reef of Santo Oscuro, where local youths taught him to dive. The pearls are formed when the female dentata oyster – twice as large as the male – consumes him utterly after they mate. The nutrients are absorbed from his shell and the flesh within it, and the remains are compressed into this beautiful black sphere.”

“My,” said Clara.

“When the pearl has been extracted, the female oyster is thrown back into the water, so that she might mate again.” The man led her a little further on.

“Did Mrs. Stewart go to, ah, Santo Oscuro with him?”

“No; Stewart’s business matters called upon him to spend much time away from home.”

“Ah. I know what that’s like,” Clara said, with an exaggerated weary shake of her head.

The man stopped. “Yes, it must be hard for you at times.”

“It was hard for my own fiancé, as well. Former fiancé.” Meeting the young man’s brightly intent gaze, Clara thought better of her candor. “Ah, what are those insects, there?”

Ranked along a shelf, back-lit, were a row of glass jars filled with a fluid the pale green of absinthe. Preserved, or drowned, in each was a large centipede or millipede, some of them of shocking size, and coiled in order to fit. The man in the ruby-bright jacket tapped one of the jars, containing a centipede about three inches in length, with striped bands around its hair-like fringe of legs.

“This creature lived in abundance in a town not far inland from Santo Oscuro. They were imported as a predator to control the many roaches infesting that town, but became far worse of a plague in themselves. Eventually, the centipedes covered almost every horizontal surface in seething hordes, a thick living carpet; they say the hissing and rustling of their bodies sounded like a constant downpour of rain. The townspeople could no longer walk the floors of their houses or streets of their town for fear of being bitten; though an individual’s sting was not serious, a great many stings could be dangerous. Gradually, the townspeople took to creating hammocks to sleep in, up off the floors. This reaction evolved over the course of a few years, until finally heavy wire cables were rigged throughout each house, with the help of men dressed in full rubber suits, who transported huge spools of cable on wagons, their mules wearing high rubber boots smeared with pesticide. These cables were attached from wall to wall, from room to room, so that the occupants could pull themselves along them above the floor, wearing harnesses attached to pulleys. Their bodies were positioned horizontally, so that they would appear to swim along these networks of wire...”

“How terrible!”

“They were forced to work, sleep, to eat, to pass their wastes while in this web of cables. The elderly, infants in baskets, all were forced to live above the centipedes which thickly covered the floor of every room. These systems of cables existed out of doors, as well. Children would pull themselves along them to their schools, men to their places of employment. When one needed to switch from one line to another, they simply unclipped themselves from one and then clipped themselves to the next. People are adaptable, and this became their normal way of life.”

“They couldn’t kill the things?”

“The dead were quickly replaced by more of the same. The creatures never run out of a food source because of their cannibalistic tendencies. In any case, Stewart spent a few weeks in the town, and while there, rumor has it he visited a brothel where he observed how the employees and their patrons had devised aerial methods to overcome the situation imposed upon them.” The man looked humorously embarrassed as he concluded, “Further rumor has it that he devised a system of cables within his own bedroom back home, as a result of his experiences, but that Isabella had him remove the web not long after.”

They had arrived at an entrance to a short hallway where a flight of stairs ascended to the next level. The man spread his arm invitingly. “There are wonderful displays on the second floor, if you’d like me to show them.”

“Certainly.” Clara nodded at the gentleman, and proceeded him. Where she might otherwise have considered a tour guide’s attentions intrusive, she actually found this young man to be informative and charming.

Greeting them on the landing, sitting in an embroidered arm chair inside a glass cabinet, one leg crossed over the other, was a human skeleton with a pipe in one hand and a book open in its lap. Clara put a hand to her breast in half-mock surprise. The guide chuckled. “These are the remains of Gardner Stewart’s twin brother, Randolph. Randolph ran Gardner’s affairs for him when the other was abroad. There is an odd but unfounded rumor about this skeleton.”

“Which is?”

“During Stewart’s frequent absences from home, some claimed that Isabella took on a series of lovers. One of these lovers was said to be Randolph. Some would have us believe that it was not Randolph who died from stomach cancer in 1894, but Gardner who died by poisoning so that Randolph could take on his identity. It seems highly unlikely, because Randolph was hardly much good with business and yet the Stewart Firearms Company continued to prosper...but some still choose to believe that we are looking upon the remains of Gardner Stewart himself.”

“Do you believe this is him?”

“No, I don’t. But there is no denying that during the time of Randolph’s demise, Isabella was seeing other men whenever her husband was away.” The guide led her out onto the balcony that encircled the central hall and looked down upon its polished floor. Against the walls of the balcony were more exhibits. Their footsteps and voices echoed dimly off the high ceiling. There were no other visitors to be seen, perhaps put off by the harsh conditions outside.

“Ah,” said the man, halting them in front of a huge sphere of amber on a pedestal which lit it from below. There was just one tiny prehistoric fly imbedded inside it, toward the top as if it had almost swum itself free of the sap before it hardened. “In 1896, Gardner and Isabella had a child, Julia. In 1900, the poor child succumbed to an illness contracted from the bite of a fly that had gotten trapped inside one of the packages Stewart sent home in his travels. Distraught, the Stewarts became interested in spiritualism, turned to a variety of people and methods in their attempts to contact their lost daughter. This globe represents one of the means they tried.”

“Like a crystal ball?”

“In a sense, yes. A medium would pore over the sphere, in order to summon an image of Julia Stewart inside it. On one occasion, Stewart claimed to have seen his own face gazing out at him, the mouth moving soundlessly in anguish, but later he wondered if perhaps it was his dead brother he had seen. On another occasion, Isabella alone said she saw a fetus curled within the ball, as if it floated in amniotic fluid. She wondered if this represented Julia, though a year later she miscarried her only other child, and came to believe that the image in the amber sphere had predicted that pregnancy and its loss.”

“How sad,” Clara muttered. Realizing she was resting one hand against her own abdomen, she withdrew it.

The guide appeared not to have noticed as they floated further along. He did catch her stealing a glance at her wristwatch, however. “Pressed for time?”

“I’m afraid so. I need to be somewhere soon, unfortunately. I got a bit lost looking for this place. This has really been interesting; thank you for your help. I neglected to take a guidebook at the front.”

“It’s just as well. They tend to be very dry. I’ll show you a final highlight of the collection on the third floor if you have a few minutes more.”

“Please do.” She accompanied him to another stairwell, and they ascended to the uppermost level.

“The death of Julia broadened the gulf between the Stewarts, unfortunately. Whether Isabella blamed him, or even herself because of her love of nature that inspired these exotic trophies, we don’t know...but in correspondence, we see that Stewart squarely laid the blame at his own feet. He also confessed to friends that he should have sent Randolph abroad in his stead, for most of his far ventures, because of the difficulties that had arisen between himself and his wife as a result of these long excursions.”

They had come upon a display case in which were mounted a number of skates and rays, some round and others with wing-like flaps, some with long barbed tails and others with short finned tails.  The red-jacketed man encompassed them all with a magician’s wave. “All these specimens came from the same source, in 1909. In that year, it was Isabella who decided she needed to take a long trip out of the country, to visit great-aunts and great-uncles she hadn’t seen since her childhood. It’s significant that her husband did not accompany her on this trip...”

“Did he refuse to, or did she forbid him?”

“We believe she forbade him. Stewart was desperate to hold onto his marriage and to make amends for his failings, but it would seem the man’s efforts were too late.” He turned his head to gaze rather sadly in at the row of leathery preserved fish. “Isabella journeyed to the city of Porto Alarma, a lovely old place by the sea. But the sea there has been known to swell radically, and in the past floods caused much death and devastation. Eventually, each building in Porto Alarma was raised from its foundations and fitted, beneath, with immense metal legs, fully mechanized and powered in their clockwork movements by great boilers in their basements. In the event of floods, every old building, every church, could raise itself above the swollen tide – or even, if the flood was drastic enough, walk themselves further inland.”

“Remarkable.”

“Yes. In 1909, during Isabella’s visit, just such a flood swept into Porto Alarma. But for reasons that to this day remain a mystery, only the two tallest buildings in the city were able to rise on their legs and move. The others hummed and billowed steam, some of them even exploding, but none of them could rise or flee the inevitable waters. Thousands were drowned. In addition to this, despite the frantic efforts of the maintenance crews within the two tallest structures, these buildings walked towards the ocean...not away from it.”

“Oh no...”

“The buildings walked out into the sea, until the waters rose around them, and eventually engulfed them. One building, the newer of the two, was built in such a way as to remain watertight. The other was not, and gradually began to fill up as the occupants inside desperately wrote farewell letters to loved ones. One of the people in that building was Isabella Stewart. But all she wrote, in a scrawl, were the words, ‘I see rays.’ It was thought that she meant, hopefully, that the tide was withdrawing and sunlight was again shining into the submerged building. But when the flood finally did withdraw, and the two buildings were uncovered out in the wasteland of slime and mud and rubble, the compromised building was discovered to be filled with a vast school of trapped rays and skates of all kinds, flapping on the floors as they drowned in air.”

The guide lightly touched Clara’s elbow, and led her back toward the staircase. As they went, he said, “Stewart was destroyed by the loss. He himself never left the country again, and never remarried. In 1928, he began to move his wife’s collections into this museum that he had built to house them. And in 1938, he himself passed away.”

They had reached the ground floor, and the man escorted her almost to the exit into the foyer. Clara faced him to thank him once more, smiling sincerely and a bit shyly. “I enjoyed that. Thank you again.”

The man’s own smile seemed a touch morose. “It was entirely my pleasure. And please, please return.”

She turned into the foyer, and the woman at the counter looked up at her. “Did you enjoy our museum, miss?” she asked blandly, like an automaton.

Clara glanced behind her, but no longer saw her guide through the open doorway. She took a few steps closer to the counter. “Yes, it was fascinating. Are there any books on Mr. Stewart and his wife in your gift shop?”

The woman straightened a little in her seat. “Mr. Stewart was never married, miss.”

“But...your tour guide...”

The woman leaned to one side to see around Clara, then sat back again. “We have no tour guides in this museum, miss.”

“But...the man in the red jacket...” She gestured awkwardly behind her.

“Oh, yes -- Mr. Gardner. He comes here often, miss. His late wife was extremely fond of our museum.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “His wife drowned herself a few years ago, poor thing.”

Clara stared at the woman for a few moments, then remembered to consult her watch. She had to be on her way. Before she approached the exit, she cast one more look over her shoulder toward the threshold to the main gallery. Then, switched her attention to the guidebooks waiting in receptacles in the front of the desk. So that she might learn the true histories of the exhibits she had seen here, she was tempted to take one of the booklets with her.

But she decided that she preferred not to.

Titles of Poem Not Written

Playgrounds of the Damned

Tampons of the Gods

Let’s Draft Uncle Sam

Fishes Armed With Rods

God’s Jelly Mold

Protoplasmic Dreams

Hamsters Brave and Bold

Termite Invasion Schemes

A Fistful of Aphorisms

North is Really South

Unheard Cataclysms

I Ate My Mouth

Cadavers on Parade

Ameba Mating Calls

I’m Butter to Your Blade

Celery Has Such Gall

Nature’s Sick Jokes

Salt According to Taste

Tarot Cards in Bicycle Spokes

My Very Own Hazardous Waste

Nuns With Bazookas

Curing a Dead Rat

Babies Smoking Hookahs

This is Really That

Pollution For Profit

Baby Seals For Brunch

Every Home’s a Tophet

God’s Without a Hunch

The Clearance Sale of Life

The Abacus of Death

A TV Set’s My Wife

Once I Heard My Breath

Close Enough

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough.”

– photographer Robert Capa (1913-1954), who was killed when he stepped on a land mine in Indochina.

It wasn’t until two decades after his assignment as a photojournalist in Vietnam that Robert Candle took a Vietnamese woman as his lover.

Her name was Linh, and she worked behind the counter in a little Vietnamese sandwich shop in the city, which Candle chanced upon one day while running an errand. He hadn’t eaten much of their food over there, but he had enjoyed their banh mi, and the small woman with black hair flowing down her back and black eyes with epicanthic folds made him one of these sub-like sandwiches on a sideboard while he watched. She was amiable, and chatted with him. A few days later he found himself back in the shop again, for another banh mi and a package of spring rolls with a spicy fish-based dipping sauce. It became a weekly ritual, until the week he invited her from behind the counter to eat dinner with him somewhere else.

Linh had come to this country in 1977, eleven years ago, in a boat that had been intercepted along the way by Thai pirates. She had avoided being raped by them, but her husband had been killed while trying to protect his sister from that fate. Linh lived in the city with her two teenage sons, in the chitin exoskeleton of one of the great insect buildings, once alive and able to interact with its inhabitants to some extent, but now just another cold monument to the time of the Guests. Linh had never remarried, and was forty to Candle’s forty-six.

“I saw a story on TV not too long ago, about a girl named Linh,” he told her over their steaks. Linh had boasted that she liked all kinds of Western food, unlike many of her people here, who stuck to their own cuisine. “It was an interview with this American who killed a North Vietnamese soldier. While he was going through this guy’s wallet he found a photograph of a little girl, posed with her father – the dead soldier. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to just throw it away, and so he hung onto it...for many years. He kept it in his own wallet, and it haunted him. The guilt. So finally, like two years ago I think, he flew back to Vietnam and managed to track down this girl – Linh – to give her the picture. The program showed it, when they met each other for the first time. The girl looked really torn for a second there, like she wasn’t sure how she should react to this man who killed her father, you know? But then they embraced each other and both of them just broke down and cried.”

Through all this, Linh had merely been nodding, her face impassive. When he had finished, she snorted. “Ha. He should have shot the little girl, too.”

Candle chuckled uneasily, surprised. “Linh,” he scolded her.

She widened her beautiful eyes at him meaningfully and simply said, drawing it out, “Vi-et Cong.”

“Well, I felt it was a very beautiful story. I thought you’d think so, too. Anyway, the little girl wasn’t Viet Cong.”

“They were all Viet Cong,” Linh told him, with venom not tempered by the years.

Candle took a slow sip of his beer, then set it down. Though he had told Linh that he’d worked as a wartime photographer in the country of her origin, he had never told her what he’d seen there. Returning his gaze to hers, with the pleasant sound of forks clinking on plates and families softly laughing all around him, he asked her, “You know about My Lai...right?”

*     *     *

“Yee-haw!” a GI named Lever called, watching his buddy Spindle ride on the back of a water buffalo. The animal was snorting furiously, eyes rolling with their whites showing, whipping around and stomping its hooves. Streams of blood ran down its dark neck as Spindle thrust his bayonet into its body again and again like a picador, somehow managing to keep himself astride it.

A sow was squealing hideously not far away. It had been purposely wounded rather than killed, so that its suffering might be protracted, in case it was a communist pig out of a story by Orwell. Strewn everywhere throughout the village dubbed My Lai 4 were slaughtered – or rather, executed – cows, pigs, ducks. One member of Charlie Company, a medic, had shot some of the maimed animals to put them out of their misery...or perhaps to occupy himself sufficiently that he wouldn’t be called upon to fire at bipedal targets.

“Ride ‘em cowboy!” a soldier named Cog cried to Spindle.

“Riding bareback,” chuckled Lever.

“Speaking of riding bareback,” said Cog, nudging his companion and pointing off in a different direction.

“Oh...hey...yeah.” Now they began howling their encouragement to another group of soldiers at play, while drifting over to join them.

Candle, the photographer, was finding it hard to line up a good picture of the young soldier atop the buffalo because of its frantic whirling. He looked up at the two men who had been shouting to Spindle, and saw where they were headed. He left Spindle to his sport in order to scurry after them.

Lever glanced over his shoulder at the photographer and grinned as if to pose for a portrait on the go. He was heavily laden with the accouterments of a warrior: a flak jacket, M-26 hand grenades, 17-shot magazines for his M-16, a canteen, a .45 in a holster, and a long braid of human hair curled around his helmet. He had sliced it off the head of a young Vietnamese girl.

“Come on, Candlelight!” he yelled. “Let’s make the Guests a movie to put that flick from last night to shame!”

Last night, March fifteenth, some of the men of Company C had sat around drinking beer, chewing steaks, and watching a skin flick. (“All we need is the apple pie,” Candle had joked humorlessly, half-aloud.) Lever called Candle Candlelight, and last night while somewhat inebriated had gripped Candle’s forearm – himself in the grip of a sudden intense epiphany – and said, “You should do a book of your pictures when you get back home, man. Not for the Guests, you know...but for you, so you can get some money off it. Win the Pulitzer Prize, man. You can call it – Inferno by Candlelight.”

“Inferno by Candlelight,” Candle had echoed, nodding, as if impressed. “Poetic...”

“I wrote poetry in high school, man,” explained Lever...who now joined a cluster of almost a dozen men who had either already raped the girl they surrounded, or were waiting for their turn to do so – like the kids they had been not so long ago, lined up at a carnival ride. “Now this is why they call this dump Pinkville!” Lever enthused.

Candle nudged between their bodies to get a shot of the girl on the ground. He took her to be about 16 years old. One GI was atop her, his green trousers bunched down past his white buttocks. Another was kneeling over her face, being fellated. She was giving a fatalistic hand job to a third soldier, no doubt praying that the simple action of her hand might make him one less man willing to kill her.

Candle knew that her complacency would not make a bit of difference. Already this day, he had photographed three soldiers as they took turns raping a girl of 17 inside a hut. After they had finished with her, one of the men had stepped back, pointed his M-16 down at her lovely exotic face and shot it utterly away.

That had been the first instance of the rite called “becoming a double veteran” that Candle had witnessed today. A “double veteran” was one who killed the woman he raped. There had been so many others since then that he already felt like a kind of long-time veteran himself, but when he had observed that first occurrence he had involuntarily lowered the camera and shouted, “Hey! Hey!”

The man who had murdered the girl looked up at Candle just a little bit menacingly. “What’s the problem, shutterbug?” He gestured with the same M-16. “Your pet seems to be having a good time.”

Shutterbug was an apt pun, and calling Candle’s attention to his camera’s obvious excitement was a sly way of reminding him of the very important function he was expected to perform for the Guests. The camera was still stimulated even with the rape finished, as it continued to gaze upon the small, shattered, doll-like body. The creature’s own body was covered in a shell of hard chitin, causing it to resemble a horseshoe crab, or a prehistoric trilobite. Its olive drab color also made it look to Candle like one of the infantrymen’s helmets. Ringing the large insect’s body was a fringe of jointed legs so fine they were almost thread-like, and when the animal became excited about what it observed and transmitted to the Guests, those legs rippled with a faster and faster rhythm. Of course, the thing itself was mindless, but its exhilaration seemed an expression of the Guests themselves as they received its images in whatever realm or plane of existence they called their home.

There was one large eye centered in the front of the creature, and a metal handle affixed to its underside. Candle often felt more like a mule hired to carry the living camera about than a real photographer. He did not have to concern himself with composition to any great extent, lighting conditions and F-stops. All he had to do was transport this animal, and point it at what he knew it wanted to see. Yes, he did extract the cylinder from its pinched rear orifice when the film strip inside was full (at which point, this model half-ejected the cylinder on its own), but the images recorded into those containers were for human use, in human newspapers, in human TV news programs. As for the Guests, who could never reach this world but were fascinated by it all the same (were perhaps all the more fascinated because they could never come here) – who could do no more than influence the mutation of simple earthly insects into useful forms – they did not need to view the record of images because they could witness the proceedings just as they happened. Moving pictures, taken in through the cyclops eye of a camera such as this one, which often seemed like a heavy extension of Candle’s own arm. A race of voyeurs, was how Candle thought of them, unseen behind the door of their own dimension...but their collective eye avidly pressed to the keyhole of his living lens.

The Guests essentially paid his bills, however. And he hadn’t told Lever last night that he did in fact entertain dreams of prizes and books, one day. Of making some kind of lasting impression, a record of his accomplishments, like the records of other lives he was ever capturing in the cartridges he inserted into his nameless pet. His own history would be defined by association with the broader history he felt compelled to secure proof of...

After a while, Candle could take no more of the teenage girl’s humiliation. Her stunned surrender made it all the more horrible to him. He lowered the camera to point at the ground but he was sure the device wouldn’t be too disappointed; there was so much yet to see. As he turned to walk away, though, Cog spotted him and said, “Hey, guy, don’t you want a piece of this?”

“No thanks,” he said.

“I’ll save ya a piece,” said Lever, who slid out his bayonet with a ringing metallic hiss from its sheath. Candle hadn’t actually seen Lever do such things himself, in the past few hours since they had arrived, but he had photographed the bodies of other women who had had their vaginas torn wider with bayonets after being raped – or perhaps before, so as to better accommodate the large Americans. One sprawled child he had seen in this condition he’d guessed to be 10 years old. He had needed to look away from her quickly, but had continued aiming the camera in her direction until he thought it had drunk its fill.

“Lick it up,” he had muttered, too softly for himself to hear over the crackle of gunfire, over the pleading wails of women and panicky shrieks of children. “Choke on it, you fuck.”

But maybe Lever had in fact been one of those to mutilate women in that way. He might even have used his bayonet to carve the words “C Company” into a corpse’s chest. Or to cut the hands off a body. Or its head. To slice out its tongue, or pry off its scalp. To slit the throat of a toddler. To disembowel an elderly grandmother. Candle had seen all this creative artistry today, rendered by the soldiers’ sculpting blades. But they had also adopted other imaginative means of exterminating the villagers. Some bodies hung from trees by their necks. One victim of a “double veteran” rite had clearly had a gun fired inside her vagina. And watching it all, sucking it all in like a vacuum cleaner, the camera made not a sound, except for the very faint swishing of its encircling centipede limbs.

Early in the massacre, Candle had caught the medic by his elbow and stopped him temporarily from dispatching wounded buffalos. “These are civilians!” he had ranted. “No one is shooting back at us! There are no VC in this fucking village!”

“Our guys are fired up...they want revenge for the men we lost in that minefield...”

“The villagers didn’t even set those mines! It was our allies, the Koreans – I thought everyone knew that now!”

“Candle, this was the order at the briefing. You think I like it? I don’t like it any more than you do! But what can I do, tackle all these kids and wrestle their guns away? What can you do, except do your job?” He had nodded at the organic camera in the photographer’s fist. “You know that thing is in absolute heaven today.”

“I thought I saw Sergeant Wrench around here,” Candle had continued fuming, glancing about him.

“Yeah, I saw him. He went into one of the hootches, dragging a girl by the arm.”

Candle had known then that it was senseless seeking out and appealing to the officer, to any of the officers. And wasn’t the medic right? As much as it repulsed him, outraged him, didn’t he have a job to do? If he didn’t catch as much of this incident as he could for the Guests, and for the newspapers, he was sure to be summoned by his superiors. Maybe even arrested for insubordination, dereliction of duty, going AWOL from his contracted function...

Now Candle drifted onward, through wafting gun smoke from hot rifle barrels and the rolling sooty smoke from burning dwellings. His boots ground spent cartridges against each other like gnashing teeth. Out of the eye-stinging black fog an old woman shuffled toward him. He saw, with such disbelief that he almost forgot to raise the camera until its wriggling legs brushed his thigh, that an unexploded M-79 grenade was embedded in her belly. For the first time today, he felt the impulse to tear from its holster the .45 Colt he wore but had never once fired. He was actually grateful, though startled, when an M-16 on fully automatic rattled and the woman went down. Fortunately for Candle, perhaps, the slugs hadn’t hit the grenade.

One of the nine airships of the 174th Assault Company came hovering overhead, the thumping of its four dragonfly wings – moving so fast they were a nearly invisible blur – making the ground smoke swirl and coil. The smoke cleared enough to expose a stand of bamboo trees, and the three people who had hunkered down behind them. They bolted. Someone on the ground opened up on them at the same time that the ship’s gunner let loose with his mounted M-60. The three Vietnamese – a man, woman and boy holding hands – were cut into pieces, the father’s head literally chopped off his body. Candle flinched, half-expecting to get hit by some of the wildly spraying rounds, but already the huge insect was wheeling its body to point in another direction, and lifting somewhat higher so the gunner could thoroughly strafe a dwelling that thus far had escaped burning.

Candle’s first real frames of the day (a trigger on the camera’s metal handle sent a mild electric jolt into the creature he carried, commanding it to transmit a particular image onto the film roll) had been shot from inside the living airship that had transported him here, and of the eight other organic craft as they began to lift off. They were huge creatures with stiff tapering tails, blind, guided by the men who rode in the hollow backs of their humped carapaces. They had been developed and shaped by the Guests – who had even made them a camouflaged olive green like Candle’s instrument – as if they were gods guiding animal species through their evolution, adapting them to a certain environment.

It was easy for Candle to despise the loudly humming monster he saw floating above him, as if it were the insect itself and not the human gunner that was unloading those pounds upon pounds of metal projectiles through the roof of the fragile home. But he didn’t hate all the organic technology the Guests had bestowed upon humankind over the decades, this technology more and more complex every year. Gifts in return for the...entertainment...these humans provided, with their rapes, murders, their wars. He was actually rather fond of the organic automobile he himself owned, a dome-shaped beetle-like creature popularly nicknamed the VW “Bug” (their sort grown on farms in Germany). But it was hard to remember, sometimes, that these living machines were not the Guests themselves. That the true nature of the Guests was unknown...anonymous...

And over the past couple of years, though in form the various mutated creatures had become more advanced, it had been noted that their life spans were not as long as they once had been. After only a year or two, an organic TV might begin to stop receiving images, rot while alive and quickly die. The living buildings that had sprouted up in greater and greater profusion in the cities, barely recognizable as having their origin in the world of terrestrial invertebrates, were dying off and decomposing as if they had contracted some mysterious disease. And then there were the Mediums – those human hosts, to some degree always in a position of authority, who carried a parasite insect which enabled them to be more directly linked to the minds of the Guests. Yes, look what was happening to some of the Mediums, lately...

Was it too much for Candle to hope that the influence of the Guests was waning, or becoming infected, corrupted? Did some interference between the dimensions now make it difficult for them to master the cells of their tools? If so, did that mean it was also harder and harder for them to peer into the realm the humans dwelt in? Candle could only pray it was so.

But what then, anyway? Humans would still want to see the staring dead eyes and the sundered flesh he caught on film. Humans would return to their own wars over politics or religion or natural resources, instead of being directed like chess pieces for the amusement and titillation of an unseen force. Either way, it would be the same...just the same...wouldn’t it?

And if the Guests faded away altogether, and every last one of their instruments decayed, could he still earn his living with a purely mechanical camera? Or would he, in essence, decay too? Candle wondered if he himself were a kind of parasite...

Three soldiers were heading toward Candle; they tended to separate into such small groups in their sweeps. He figured it was one of these men who had fired upon the family that had been hiding behind the bamboo trees. As they came, one of them made an exclamation and raised his M-16 a little higher. Candle glanced around behind him. He saw that the small boy who had been struck down with his parents was staggering dazedly after him, somehow still alive despite having had his nose torn away and one arm broken off at the elbow, hanging by only a few rubber bands of tissue.

“Jesus Christ,” Candle breathed, as if that were the person he had seen so miraculously resurrected.

Of course, the soldiers spattered him with bullets and he crumpled without a whimper. Candle spun to glare at them, but saw one of the GIs had tears streaming down his face.

“This is too much, too much,” he blubbered, sagging, and one of the other GIs took him by the arm to support him. The man yanked himself free. “Too much,” he said, as he and his buddies veered off in another direction.

Candle forced himself to temper the overall hatred of his countrymen that had suffused him today. He reminded himself that the Vietnamese could treat their own people with shocking brutality. And, he had seen three American soldiers early on in today’s attack herding a small group of civilians out of the village, urging them to flee for their lives. He knew he did not walk amongst devils or angels. Just humans. That was bad – and good – enough.

As if he himself were one of the patrolling soldiers, moving from one scene of murder to the next like pollinating bees, Candle resumed his wandering of the village the Americans had dubbed Pinkville, in reference to the target-like red dot that denoted its place on their maps. Tramping briskly along, lest he miss some tasty tidbit to feed his pet, he squinted up at the dragonfly monster as it swivelled again, rose higher, fluttered away like a pollinating bee itself.

He came upon a man he knew as Rivet, who was shouting at a cowering knot of women and thrusting a .45 at them. “Come here! Come here, you. VC Boom, right? You a VC Boom?” He was asking her if she were a prostitute, despite the fact that she held an infant. He was unzipping his fly with his free hand, trying to get the woman to understand with gestures of flicking hand and waggling penis and pointing gun that if she didn’t go down on him he would shoot her baby. Sobbing uncontrollably, the woman nevertheless handed her child to one of the other weeping women. Candle stopped clicking frames once the woman actually knelt down in front of the American (a shoving hand on the top of her head). The photographer denied his camera more than that; not just the oral rape, but the “double veteran” ritual that was sure to follow.

Still, he soon chanced upon a “double veteran” in progress. A girl of about 14 lay nude on the ground with a soldier atop her and another standing by, buckling his equipment-laden belt. As Candle approached, the GI rose from the girl, planted a foot on her belly when she tried to sit up, and let loose a brief volley into her head.

Their different appearance and language made them seem less like humans, more like things to these men, Candle mused. But they were not so alien that they weren’t sexually arousing...just alien enough to slaughter.

On, he walked. He could almost feel his camera tugging at his arm like a bloodhound. A Ouija board’s planchette, pointing itself at the urging of the ghosts they called the Guests. But he knew he alone was the camera’s legs, however much its cilia-like limbs rippled. He was the driver of a getaway car; just as culpable. Right? He was an accomplice...

He passed a buffalo fallen on its side, still snorting defiantly as it lay dying. His trigger was depressed, but instead of releasing a merciful killing bullet he merely recorded the beast’s suffering. Click. In front of the smoldering ruins of one of the first houses burned he aimed his camera at a blackened corpse, a cinder in the shape of a woman, her arms raised in the air as if she waited for someone to take her hands and lift her to her feet. Click. A heap of maybe thirty bodies, intestines disgorged from burst bellies; at the top of the pile like the crowning cherry on a sundae, the body of a naked baby with one soft buttock blasted away. Click.

It’s history, Candle told himself, pointing the camera at the mound of bodies stacked up like rubbery mannequins. He knew, from experience, how far away to stand, how best to align the camera (it had two horny fin-like ridges on its back that he liked to sight between), despite the lack of a viewfinder. Yeah – I’m a real artist, he thought. Real talented. But it was history; he must preserve it. It would make a difference. All titillation of Guests, of newspaper buyers, of TV watchers aside...someone would learn a lesson from this, wouldn’t they? These images would serve a different and greater value – right? It was an awesome responsibility; he was obligated to transcribe the very worst of these atrocities onto film. Because otherwise, one day it wouldn’t seem real anymore. It would be forgotten. New atrocities would replace it, like a dune in the desert swept away as the next dune formed. It would have never happened at all.

It was history. It was history. And this was the only way he could will the strength into his finger to squeeze that trigger again. Click. Again. Click...

He was surprised that he hadn’t vomited. Dismayed at himself that he hadn’t even shed a tear. God; even some of the murderers had shed tears. But tears would blur the lenses of his eyes, and his brain was as much a roll of film as the one jammed up his camera’s ass. And he was like that little boy who had come tottering along with his nose gone and his arm swaying by a tether. Shell-shocked. Traumatized. Numbed beyond real comprehension.

But he wished he could cry...if only to reaffirm that he was still sane, still alive, still human.

The camera seemed almost to know that they had reached a kind of destination. Ahead of him, Candle recognized one of the officers with two of his men. At some point or another, they had rounded up a group of what Candle judged to be fifty or sixty Vietnamese – primarily the very elderly, women, children and infants – and had them all squatting close to the ground. The villagers gazed up in dread at the tall, uniformed men speaking in an alien language, carrying bulky weapons...stared at one individual in particular. The man Candle fixed his attention on.

His name was Lieutenant William L. Broom, and he was a Medium.

In the early days, beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, the Guests had only been able to create a more direct link with these selected individuals – always, with the host’s consent – by means of a large, tick-like insect affixed to the back of their skulls like an immense tumor. As the decades had progressed and the biotechnology had evolved, however, the parasites had become less bulky and grotesque, until now the creatures were so small (secreted away inside a host’s head) that one could not tell a Medium by appearance alone.

And yet, lately there had been the decline and decay of so much of the Guests’ organic technology. The Mediums had not gone unaffected. Candle had noticed earlier today that Lt. Broom had been wearing a patch of gauze taped over his ear, and had assumed at the time he was suffering a draining infection or perhaps a wound. But now he realized the truth. The patch of gauze was in need of changing; it was soaked a dark brown color. Also, a band of fluid too dark and seemingly too thick to be blood was running out of one of the man’s nostrils. He licked the little hollow above his lip, unconsciously. As the photographer approached them, the officer was raging at his two men.

“I thought...I thought...damn it,” he was bellowing, his face flushed red, pacing back and forth in front of the hunkering villagers, “you idiots...I thought I told you to take care of them!” He was visibly trembling. Quaking, as if he might flop to the ground in a full-fledged seizure.

“We are – we’re watching over them,” one of the two soldiers answered a bit meekly, cowed by his commander’s display.

“No! No! No!” Broom shouted, suddenly only inches from the man’s nose, spraying him with spittle and flecks of the syrupy brown blood. “I didn’t ask you to babysit them...you...you...you fucks...fuck...fucking kill them. I meant for you to k-k-kill them!”

“Sir...”

“Form a line. You too,” he barked at the other soldier. And he looked at Candle and started to command him to join the firing squad, also, until he saw that he was carrying an avid camera, not a dispassionate gun. There had been attempts by the Guests to create organic guns, perhaps transmitting images from the very instruments that spewed killing projectiles – maybe even transmitting brief snapshots from each tiny beetle-like bullet itself – but none of these mutations had been viable.

“C’mere, c’mere, c’mere...c’mon, c’mon...we’ll line up here...here...here, you stupid fucks...line up...we’ll fire into them...we’ll...fire when I tell you. When I tell you, you fire, understand? Huh? Answer me!”

The first soldier lifted the grenade launcher he carried. “Ah, sir, if I...if I shoot this, we could get hurt, too. And, it would be a waste of ammo, sir. I’ll just hang back – watch out for anyone trying to escape...”

Broom didn’t contest what to Candle was clearly a ruse by the soldier to avoid taking part in the firing squad. The officer instead wheeled at the second man and roared. “You! You fire with me! Now, damn it, now! Now! Shoot them, kill them, fucking kill them!”

Then Lt. Broom and his man turned and opened up on the people squatting before them, not even a dozen feet away, their M-16s flicked to fully automatic. Candle pointed the camera at the villagers like a third gun, after all. Some of the victims tried to stand up and run, but they were sprayed with lead and went down fast...clumps of flesh, chips of bone, tatters of clothing and a mist of blood rising up like fragmented ghostly effigies in their place.

He saw arms shot off bodies. Heads torn from their necks by the bullets. The soldier Broom had commanded to join him broke off after a while, his face awash with tears, and tried to push his steaming gun at the soldier with the grenade launcher, but that man would not accept it. The man with the grenade launcher even began yelling curses at the officer, but heedless of his traitorous men, Lt. Broom went on firing alone...reloading his weapon with magazine after magazine...swearing or yelling but his words incomprehensible beneath the chattering of his rifle.

“God help us,” Candle himself uttered. But he couldn’t hear his own words, either. “God help us...”

When the officer’s gun ran empty for the last time, not a single one of the heaped bodies so much as twitched. Candle could see that mothers had made themselves into shields over the bodies of children. He could think of no braver act for a parent, for a human being, to perform than that. But it had been to no avail.

Facing his men, trembling less violently, as if some domineering lust had been assuaged, in a surprisingly composed tone Lt. Broom said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Fucker,” Candle muttered, trudging along after him and the two infantrymen, staring at the back of Broom’s head as if he expected to see the parasite part the hair there to gaze back at him mockingly. He felt he had no choice but to follow him; his camera’s legs were practically swimming in the air to keep up.

As they marched, they passed yet another dead buffalo lying by the path, and a butterfly fluttered up into the air from behind it, so that it looked to Candle as if the insect had emerged from the body of the torn animal itself. The butterfly put him in mind of an article he had read in a magazine recently. There was an insect native to Asia referred to as a tear-sucking moth, more formally known as Lobocraspis griseifusa. This moth would poke a buffalo in the eye with its proboscis, causing tears to form, which it would then drink for the salt and white blood cells they contained. The drinking of tears was called “lachryphagy”. Reading about this moth had reminded Candle of the Guests – nourishing themselves on human tears instead...

Eventually, they arrived at an irrigation ditch on the eastern edge of the village. Here, Candle estimated another fifty or so prisoners had been herded together and made to stand down in the ditch itself, this gouge in the earth looking like a trench dug for soldiers. Candle saw Broom sit and rest for a little bit as more soldiers arrived. In the mean time, the officer rubbed at his temple and looked at his fingers, repeatedly, as if he expected to see more blood leaking from the very sutures of his skull. Finally, as if drugged into slow motion, he looked up at his men and slurred, “We’ve got another job to do.” He rose.

Broom became increasingly animated again after his brief stupor. Candle was unable, or afraid, to take his eyes off him. The officer began attempting to interrogate an aged Buddhist monk. Candle himself could barely make out the officer’s shouted questions, and knew the monk was understanding none of it. Finally, in disgust, Broom drew back his M-16 and used its butt to hammer the monk directly in the teeth. The man managed to remain on his feet, pathetically dignified.

Candle peripherally saw a toddler, maybe two years old, climbing up the side of the trench as if he might escape unnoticed. Broom did notice, however, and broke off from his interrogation to snatch the child up into his hands, throw it back into the ditch, and fire a burst from his M-16 into its body. He then stormed back to the monk, ignoring the screams and wails rising as if from the very pit of hell.

But Broom was getting nowhere with the holy man – and suddenly, impatiently, shoved him into the ditch and riddled him with bullets, too.

More villagers were shepherded to the trench, struck with rifle butts if they hesitated too long in scrambling down to join the others. Not long before, a couple of the soldiers had been playing in a subdued way with some of the village children, as if to soothe them, but now these children had been added to the ditch, too. Candle could read dread in the faces of these GIs. It was strangely reassuring to him, to see that emotion there.

In fact, Candle saw one of the soldiers, a black man named Hinge, bluntly refuse when ordered by the lieutenant to prepare to fire upon the prisoners in the ditch. Broom’s face went a shade of purple, as if he were asphyxiating on his own rage, and he leveled his rifle at the man’s eyes...but several other soldiers leaped in front of Hinge.

“You fucks...you cowardly fucks...you fucking traitors...I’ll court-martial you, I’ll kill you...k-k-kill you...” He began to stamp over to the lip of the trench.

Candle had flicked his eyes from the officer to the people massed down on the floor of the ditch. He saw a tiny elderly woman in a red shirt, her face twisted in anguish, a younger woman hugging her from behind with her face pressed against the back of the old woman – her mother? Beside them, a woman in black pajamas held her son, a toddler with his eyebrows raised in confused trepidation, on her hip. On the other side of the old woman, a little girl in a white shirt and black pants – her hair cut into a black helmet with a fringe of bangs – clung to another adult woman with a look of absolute terror on her face, like the theatrical mask of tragedy, and Candle found himself jerking the camera in their direction to capture forever that ephemeral mask of flesh.

“Wait!” he heard himself yell. But although he was instinctively, professionally doing his job in pointing the camera at this knot of victims, he had not called “wait” so that he might get his shot before they opened fire. He had called “wait” as an involuntary exclamation – as if at the last moment he might stop them from what they were about to do.

But Lt. Broom began discharging his weapon down into the ditch. Several other men took this as their signal to open fire, as well, and the chorus of gunfire became deafening. The little group of people Candle had specifically focused his attention on were cut down out of his sight, lost in the smoke and flying blood and dropping bodies. An image on the retina, a blink, and then gone.

One rifle ran empty...then another. At last, the fusillade had ended. Candle’s ears felt muffled; it would be hours before his hearing would clear.

Lt. Broom staggered backwards, away from the edge of the ditch – suddenly dropped his gun to the ground and collapsed onto his knees. None of the men watching him went to his aid as he reached up, gaping dazedly, to his ear and peeled the dressing from it. It came away in sticky strands. He held it before his eyes, and Candle could see that a small insect lay dead in the middle of the gummed blood. Whether the parasite had died before, during or after the killing, he would never know.

Slowly, Lt. Broom rose, and tossed the bandage with the insect into the ditch, too. Candle watched him stagger away from the scene as if again in a stupor. He took a shot of Broom’s receding form, but he could tell from the slowed churning of its legs that his camera was less interested in the man without a gun in his hands...

A year later, and there would be no more Mediums. And the last of the Guests’ organic machines would have died. The Guests would no longer be a presence in this world, in this dimension. As far as anyone could tell, at least.

Without the parasite in his skull, without the Guests behind him, Lt. Broom would be brought to trial for what he had done that day, and Candle would follow the events closely in the newspapers. There was no longer TV. After these decades of dependence on Guest biotechnology, purely electrical, inorganic televisions would be several more years in coming.

Many would revile William L. Broom. Many, many would support him. Some would call him a victim of the Guests. Others would point out that the Guests had not controlled the Mediums, merely used them as intermediaries. In a sermon, one minister would liken the martyred scapegoat William L. Broom to Jesus Christ.

Candle’s camera began to grow ill over the weeks following the massacre, oozing brownish fluid from its rear orifice and often prematurely ejecting the loaded film cylinder.

He had heard that several dragonfly copters had expired while in flight, crashing with their occupants still on board...and for this reason, he was glad that planes had not become organic yet. After several weeks of persistence, he had finally won in his efforts to fly home, citing mental exhaustion as one of the reasons.

He was testily ordered to pass along his gear to a replacement photographer once he reached stateside, but his camera breathed its last on the plane carrying Robert Candle back to the USA. Though he would have to turn its carcass over to his superiors, to prove he had not killed the important creature himself, he wanted nothing more than to hurl its body from the plane while it was still in flight...as he had heard helicopter crews were fond of doing with prisoners, while high above the jungle treetops.

*     *     *

“That never happened,” said Linh, seated across from him in the restaurant. Later – soon – when she became his girlfriend and his lover, she would make it her habit to slip off one shoe under whatever restaurant table they sat at, and rub his legs or even his crotch with her sole, her eyes glinting at him mischievously. She had the most remarkable eyes; he could not separate pupil from iris in them, they were so black. And in one picture of her he took, with a mechanical camera that he had been using for two decades now, he even thought he saw himself reflected in her eyes. Sure enough, when he blew the photo up in the lab in his apartment, he could clearly see himself standing there on a pathway in a park with his camera brought up to his face, captured in both of her eyes. Later he would wonder if he had been reflected in the eyes of any of the people, dead or soon to be dead, he had photographed twenty years ago in her country. If he enlarged any of those photos now, would he discover himself secreted within them – in a way, as much a part of the photographs as the victims themselves?

“What?” he stammered. “Don’t say that, Linh! Oh my God...of course it happened!”

“The Viet Cong made that up,” she insisted.

“They did not make it up. It was Americans that brought it to the public, to the newspapers, to...”

“They were told to say that.”

“Told by who? For what? Look, there’s proof it happened. There are photos...”

“Bob,” she laughed helplessly, knowing she couldn’t convince him now, leaning across the table to squeeze his forearm in both her hands. “Vi-et Cong...” was all she could add, simply to excuse why she would even try to debate the issue, how she could hold her beliefs.

But he went on, “I took photos. I was there. I took the photos.”

She sat up straight after that, staring at him. “You did?”

“I’ll show you the pictures. After we eat, I’ll show you my book, at my apartment, okay?” The book was called By Candlelight: the Photographs of Robert Candle. It had been released four years ago. Some of his photos hung in a gallery in this city, as part of their permanent collection. He had never seen them there, but he knew that some of his photographs also hung in the War Remnants Museum, previously known as The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

“Okay, Bob...okay...I want to see that.”

“How can you say it never happened?” he persisted. “That’s like saying the Guests never happened. But we have evidence, right? All around us. The building you and your boys live in...”

“I know, Bob, yes...”

“I was there, Linh.” His voice was fragmenting. Tears were blurring the lenses of his eyes. “I saw it. I was there.”

“Poor my guy.” She reached across the table again and took his hand, held it tightly, rubbing her thumb across his. She could find no pity for the hundreds of her imagined enemy, killed on March 16, 1968, but she felt pity for her new lover. And her touch soothed him, helped stop the tears quickly, but they were the first tears he had shed over what he had seen that day. He tried to smile at her, grateful in some way for it, and she whispered again, “Poor my guy.”

Sympathetic Identity Disorder

It was Beclard in his Faculté de Méd. de Paris, 1815, who was the first to observe – or at least, to document – the condition that has come to be known by modern physicians as Sympathetic Identity Disorder. In the case in question, Beclard examined a seventeen-year-old Marie Lambert, who appeared to be in perfect health, but whose family insisted the raven-haired brown-eyed girl had been a red-haired and blue-eyed infant, having gradually come to resemble her deceased mother to an uncanny degree over the years.

Subsequent cases investigated by Worbe (Jan. Et Fev, 1816) and Ward (Internat. Med.
Magaz., Phila., July 1895), among others, similarly document cases in which children – significantly, in every instance born to mothers who died in childbirth – came to so greatly resemble their mothers as they matured as to suggest something more of a physical reconfiguration than simple hereditary similarity. Some have ventured that latent genetic potentialities surfaced with puberty, while others propose a more psychosomatic cause for this change in appearance (though naturally, in some of the earlier cases there were no photographs or even portraits by which a child might imprint upon their subconscious an image of the mother they never knew). In Ward’s case, the young woman had even developed a wine birthmark identical to her mother’s, though she bore not the slightest trace of this until her later adolescence.

My own personal experience with this disorder was the most marvelous if poignant of the cases I have researched in my many years as a physician. Sixteen years ago I was called upon to examine a young woman by the name of Joan Crestfallen, whom I found to be an exceptionally lovely girl of eighteen, with a commendable figure and delicately feminine airs. Upon interviewing this young woman and her family, however, and viewing photographs of Joan as a younger child, I believed their assertion that Joan had previously been a male, then called John, who had taken on the appearance of the parent he had never seen in person. This radical alteration in form had taken its toll on the poor creature’s psychological state as well, making her (as I regarded the being) exceedingly meek, unwilling to much venture into society for fear of ridicule. However withdrawn and melancholy Joan might have been, however, I found her to be charming and captivating to an extent that made my objective interest in the case difficult and uncomfortable.

Despite our mutual bashfulness, Miss Crestfallen allowed me to examine her reproductive organs, which were fully and wondrously regular in formation externally, though internally, I determined that there was a complete absence of the ovaries and fallopian tubes (both anomalies quite rare) and of the uterus as well (more common an abnormality). The clitoris did present the possibility of being an atrophied penis, but there were no traces of testicles if I am to believe, as Joan insisted, that she ever possessed them (and again, her birth certificate – if authentic – bore out her claims). The mammae were remarkably and appealingly well developed. She had no facial hair, a feminine voice, would in no way have suggested any masculine trait to me were I to have met her in a purely social setting. And when I was presented with numerous photographs of her mother, I could scarcely believe they were not of Joan herself. The only difference between her mother and herself appeared to be that her mother had of course been capable of giving birth. (There is the case Worbe relates in which the patient was in fact able to become pregnant and give birth – having been a woman to begin with, however. But I mention this fact because the patient herself died in childbirth...and whether her female child came to resemble its mother, and hence its grandmother, in later years is unfortunately not documented.)

Though shy in the extreme, during one of my examinations Joan rested her forehead against my shoulder, then lifted her face as if to invite me to kiss her, which I did not. She was visibly very hurt by my rejection, and I wonder to this day if I made the correct decision in not accommodating her...because I have never felt quite the same emotion of tenderness for a woman – and while I have refrained from discussing this case for many years because I felt it might call into question my professional ethics, I must at last address it, as it is one of the most unusual – and haunting – experiences of my rather singular career.

As in many of the cases I encounter, there is no cure where there is no known cause. But I am sad to report that in a sense Joan Crestfallen cured herself of her depression and confusion as to her true identity, when a mere six months after I encountered her, I received the news that she had hung herself in the basement of her parents’ home. There is no question that her melancholy was manifold: Joan was in doubt as to the nature of own physical sexuality, her own identity, in a sense – her own soul. She mourned for a mother she never knew, except as herself. And she mourned for the second great absence in her life – myself. I can say no more on this subject, if I should even have said this much.

American Cchinnamasta

I saw a picture of the Hindu goddess Cchinnamasta in a book in the library, and I wish I had photocopied the drawing, or stolen the book, because now I can’t remember the book’s title or even the subject matter, and so I can not recall the drawing exactly...it’s like trying to remember a dream. But I do remember that Cchinnamasta had cut off her own head; maybe she had a sword or a long knife in one hand, maybe she had more than two arms. But I clearly remember two things. She was holding her decapitated head in one of her hands, and a stream of her own blood was arcing out of her neck stump, straight into her head’s mouth. Though she should be dead, drinking her own blood was keeping her alive, and beautiful. That’s the other thing I remember. Cchinnamasta was beautiful.

I’ve looked for that picture on the internet and have been very frustrated. The one picture of her, supposedly of her, I could find showed her with her head attached. Though it was a lovely painting, I could not believe this was the correct goddess to go along with the brief description of her.

Another site, with no picture but more information, helps me remember details like the two Shaktis who also drink streams of her blood. Though I am half Indian, I don’t know what a Shakti is. My ex-boyfriend Alex used to tease me that I wouldn’t know an East Indian from an American Indian any better than Columbus would.

It says lotuses decorate her breasts. Maybe I can recall that. It says she has three eyes, like black Kali with her long wolfish tongue. Kali is easy to find. Maybe it’s because Cchinnamasta is less well known, more obscure, harder to search out and find that draws me more to her. It’s like I’m arduously climbing some mountain to meet her at last, face to face.

She sits above the horny god of love. Why can’t I remember that part?

A snake is tied around the jewel on her forehead, besides her having that third eye. By jewel I guess they mean bindi. I have never worn a bindi, but I have a small dark mole almost directly between my eyebrows as if Nature or some goddess wants me to acknowledge that I am half Indian even when I would rather not...which is usually. Almost always. So always, in fact, that I am sneaky and guilty about researching Cchinnamasta even though Alex has recently moved out and won’t catch me looking.

You can get bindis online whether you’re Indian or not. Some years back Madonna and Alanis Morisette went through their Indian thing. Alanis seemed to mean it. I broke down once and bought anklets off a web site because Alex thought they looked sexy; they hooked over my second toe and around my ankles in a kind of beaded lace that from a distance looked like a henna tattoo. I don’t wear them any more, though I like to go barefoot whenever I can, I even slip my shoes off under my chair at work, and Alex reasoned this was my Indian side. I hated him talking about it, but he said it made me exotic. He wanted me to buy one of those kits and put mehndi tattoos on my hands because he thought that was sexy too but I wouldn’t. They’re too conspicuous, like these black spider webs all over your fingers. They wear them on the hands, the feet, even the bottoms of the feet and the palms and around the eyes to protect you from contact with stuff. Why do religions all seem to hate the earth and the things in it, try to buffer you from the icky touch of reality?

Cchinnamasta’s six mantras are 1: Shrim Aim Klim Sauh Shrim Hrim Klim Aim Haum 2: Om Krim Strim Krom 3: Im Hum Phat 4: Shrim Klim Hum Aim Vajravairochaniye Hum Hum Phat Svaha. 5: Shrim Hrim Hum Aim Vajra Vairochaniye Shrim Hrim Aim Phat Svaha and 6: Shrim Aim Klim Sauhm Shrim Hrim Klim Aim Haum Om Shrim Klim Hum Aim Vajra Vairochaniye Hum Hum Phat Svaha. Jesus Christ. Maybe my sister Parina would be able to understand or even say all that, but I can’t. Parina is fully Indian. We have the same father, different mothers.

Well, at least I looked up Shakti just now on the web and it has something to do with the creative power of male Hindu gods taking the tangible form of goddesses called Shakti. I guess that’s kind of neat. At least Hinduism isn’t as patriarchal as some religions. But I’m no more a Hindu than I am a Mormon, no matter what Alex wanted me to be; I’m not like that woman Anna Kashfi that Marlon Brando married because he thought she was this exotic Indian only to find out she was just from Wales or whatever. I can’t be who I’m not. I’m not your little Parina; sorry, Dad. Can you believe Alex bought the Kama Sutra and wanted to try every position? All that sticking my sweet stamen in your honeyed garden crap. Fuck that.

*     *     *

Parina’s mother is Indian, so she has the dark skin I don’t. There is a resemblance between us, though, and we’re only two years apart (she’s younger). We both have the long black hair. We’re both short and on the curvy side; I guess she’s a little less curvy than me. Both have the full lips, and these funny shaped ears with big lobes that stick out, ugh, good thing for the thick hair. My left eye turns in a little; Alex said it was cute. We both have big dark eyes like the girls in Japanese anime but something about her lids makes them look more Indian than mine. We first met when I was eighteen and she was sixteen and surprisingly we hit it off, even though I was prepared to hate her. She stayed with us through the summer while Dad was back in New Delhi on business, with his wife. I didn’t want to know Parina but by the time she left we were both in tears and I wanted her to stay with me forever. We’ve seen each other a few times since, for not as prolonged a visit. Maybe I shouldn’t say this but one night we kissed and felt each other’s breasts a little. We’d had a few beers. But I love her as my real sister, I really do, even though I disown my Dad as my Dad.

My Mom won’t talk about him much but he wasn’t with her long, never married her, and I can tell it wasn’t much more than an affair. He wanted some Wasp ass, but he ended up marrying an Indian woman, making his family from more familiar cells, raising Parina as his daughter but not even bothering to see me until I was ten and then when I was twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and only briefly...maybe because he thought every two years he’d have another chance of sleeping with Mom. The last time I saw him was when I was twenty and I’m twenty three now so I figured he must have given up on Mom. But I missed Parina, even though she had a Dad like I should have had except he wasn’t into me or was even ashamed of me because I wasn’t this perfect and pure little brown Shakti that jumped out of his forehead, this manifestation of himself.

Parina is going to school to be a doctor like Dad. I’m a telemarketer. At least I don’t have an Indian accent at all; that might put off the people I call up, who get annoyed enough as it is.

I had a dream a few weeks ago, the same night I heard Parina and our Dad and her Mom (who I’ve never met) would be in Massachusetts this summer for a few weeks. My Mom said they’d probably drive by to see us. In my dream, I saw Dad come in the doorway after Parina, who was in a sari this time even though when she stayed with me that summer she liked tight jeans and tube tops, and I felt disappointed that her hair was all tightly braided instead of hanging down hippie style like mine all crazy twisty snakes, and her little quiet smugly smiling Mom was in a sari too, but Dad was in a three piece suit and he had a briefcase. When he was in our hall, he set the case down on the hallway table, opened it up, and took out this big chopper-like knife that he used as a doctor, I figured. He raised it up and I screamed because I thought he was going to hack my Mom.

Instead, he swung it at this awkward angle and lopped off his own head, like a male Cchinnamasta, which was a blasphemy. He caught his head by the hair, his wire framed glasses still on his nose, and three bright geysers of blood shot up and out of his neat neck stump as if from a water sprinkler. One stream arced into the mouth of his own severed head. Parina caught another stream in her smiling mouth, and her Mom caught the third stream.

My Mom and I didn’t get any.

*     *     *

Last night we all went out and had dinner together, Indian food, surprise. Mom and Mrs. Dad were pleasant to each other, everyone was pleasant, Parina and I talked a lot but it wasn’t like before which makes me sad, and I hated telling her about Alex’s arrival and departure, the whole relationship covered in ten minutes. She’s seeing someone but I don’t know if she’s slept with him or with anybody. She’s a little thinner now, her cheekbones more pronounced; I preferred her with a little more baby fat, she was smoother in the face. She has a little gem in her left nostril but she wasn’t wearing a bindi. She wasn’t in a sari, even, but it felt like she was.

Dad kept smiling at me, smugly, like he was proud of me, like I was this possession, a flower he had once planted that had bloomed prettily in his absence, he kept calling me beautiful. Maybe you’d like to fuck me, I thought. The perfect fuck. Both Indian and Wasp. I can see it in all three of your eyes, Dad with your hanging Kali tongue you false goddess.

I was hoping Parina would want to sleep over instead of at the hotel, I hoped she or someone would suggest it but no one did so I didn’t bring it up. In a way, though, I think I was also relieved. Yes, after Alex left I moved back in with my Mom because I couldn’t swing the rent alone.

Some of the Indian food was great and some of it was gross. I prefer Chinese or Middle Eastern. The names of the various dishes meant nothing to me. I watched Dad slice some curried chicken with his fork and knife and I imagined him carving open one of his patients. I remembered him with that big bladed instrument in my dream. He sensed me watching I think because he lifted his eyes directly up to mine and I had to look away. But when I looked back he was chewing the chunk of flesh, like he was reclaiming one of the personified Shaktis he had manifested, slicing her up and chewing her up and swallowing her so he could produce another one in her place.

*     *     *

The third day of their trip, though, which is today, Parina was dropped off to spend with me because I had said I would take the day off from work. Mom went to her job and Parina and I painted each other’s toe nails like teen agers though she just turned twenty one. We decided to rent a video and she picked Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love because she’d never seen it before. She was all giggly about it. I said, oh, come on...it sounded like some late Friday night Cinemax movie but she said it was by the director of Salaam Bombay! which I guess was supposed to be an impressive bit of trivia. So I said yeah, yeah, okay, and we took it home and made popcorn and watched it on the couch with our bares toes shining.

I had given us both a Corona, with lime in it and salt on the rim even.

The beer was a mistake, though I only had two. If I haven’t eaten much I can get a good buzz off two beers, though my perfect buzz is two mai tais, no more and no less. But her mistake was renting that stupid movie. Because it was very sexy, and the actress Indira Varma was so beautiful. I had snuggled up closer to my sister and put my arm around her shoulders and rested my head against her head. She smiled when I did that. But when I reached up very, very gently, very tenderly, and ran my fingers along the outer curve of her breast she pulled away very sharply.

She looked at me darkly, her eyes so huge, so black, could mine possibly be so black, and Indian women have this kind of pouty sneer which I don’t quite have, and she said come on, don’t do that. It really repulsed her. I could see if she wasn’t into it, fine...I wasn’t even going to go far with it, though I did want to kiss her, but it wasn’t like I tried going down on her. We did this before. It wasn’t like we hadn’t. Did she forget? Or want to forget?

Right away she got up to use the bathroom; I think just to get away from me for a minute. So I sat there watching the movie alone for that minute, and although it continued being sexy, or because it continued being sexy, I couldn’t enjoy it any more. I got up and went to the kitchen and stood between the fridge and the counter wondering if I wanted another beer. My face was so hot, like a balloon full of blood, all the blood in my body, which made my body feel emptied and weak. I clung to the counter for support. I slid open the drawer by my hand and I took out the bread knife and I walked to the bathroom with it.

The door wasn’t fully closed so I pushed it open. I saw the strip of a sanitary napkin poking up from the little waste basket by the toilet. Parina was done and washing her hands but when she looked up she seemed angry again that I had come right in without knocking so before she could say anything about it I cocked the knife back and jammed it downward into the hollow at the front of her throat. It went in deep, about half of the blade’s nine wide inches, nine inches like a good sized cock in her throat. I felt like a man, suddenly. She fell back against the side of the tub with her beautiful eyes no longer angry, just more huge, and I loved her then all over again, so I had to stop her right there, before either of us could change again, to seal this moment in time, so I knelt down over her and I took hold of the handle which I had let go of after I stuck the knife in her. I curled both fists around the handle and leaned my breastbone right on the end of it, pushing it the rest of the way in and working it to the side like a stuck lever. For a few moments her hands tried to hold mine but they grew light and faded away. When I removed my slippery palms from the knife, they were red with her blood and looked like they’d been tattooed with mehndi.

I stood over her, just looking down at her for a while, and one big fat tear plopped right on her foot with its frosted pink toe nails which still had a strong chemical smell.

After going to the living room, watching a few more minutes of the movie while I toweled off my hands, I shut the thing off, stopped it in the middle of a very romantic scene, froze it right in that perfect moment of love and ecstasy. I returned to the bathroom. The blood was spreading from beneath her like big butterfly wings so I shut myself in with her as if the door would contain it. I bent down over her, close to Parina. I kissed her full, open lips. I sucked her entire lower lip in my mouth and it tasted of salty buttery popcorn and there was still a faint smell of beer on her breath. I bit her lip. I tried to bite it off, it was so full and succulent, I wanted it in me, I wanted her in me so we would be joined forever but it wouldn’t bite off, so I worked the knife out of her brown neck, wiped it a little so it was less slippery, and stuck it through her lip in the middle, sort of sawing off to one side so that it hung half off her chin. Now I could bite the rest of it off...more like tearing it off to one side.

I chewed it. It was soft but rubbery. I choked because I had to swallow it whole like a raw oyster, ultimately. I gasped for breath afterward. I still had tears on my cheeks though partly from the choking.

Like a cat, I hunkered even closer to the floor. I licked some of the blood from the pool, but it wasn’t intimate enough. Instead, I switched to licking the blood still flowing out of the slit that had opened wide like another mouth in her neck. I pushed my tongue into it as if it were her honeyed garden and her blood flowed in rhythmic heavy wave after wave over my tongue and down my throat. It was a beautiful bonding. It was poetic. Her blood sustained me, gave me a sustenance I had known so little of.

I wanted more, however. I wanted her so inside me that we would be as one.

In the kitchen I found another knife but this one’s long blade was thin and serrated. With this, I sawed off a toe. The smallest toe on her left foot, so I could swallow it more easily with a swig of my third Corona, with no lime or salt to compete with the taste of my Parina and there was salt enough in her beautiful rose red blood.

I didn’t want to consume her eyes because I wanted them on me in their snapshot beauty but her lids were closed now so I had to slice them off, which left her with a ragged and ugly effect but at least we could see each other now.

After I ate the lids, so she would no longer be blinded by her father to her kinship with me, our sisterly love for each other, I stretched out beside her on the tiles and rested my head on her chest while her warm life fluid soaked into my clothing and dyed my skin. Her chest was still warm too, her shapely breasts bigger than mine, soft as pillows, I could smell the soft musk of her skin through her t-shirt, and then I sat up to quickly cut the t-shirt away so I could taste the life-giving nipples of those breasts...take them in so they would nourish me forever. With her generous neck and now her breasts, she was an even more abundant provider than Cchinnamasta. America is the land of plenty, Parina.

*     *     *

I am surprised that Dad has come to see me here, three times already. Not with his wife, though. How could such a homely woman have given birth to so lovely a daughter? It almost makes me imagine my Wasp Mom managed to give birth to Parina after all.

I don’t know if Dad comes because he pities me. Or if because with Parina gone, I’m the only daughter he has left. Or maybe, maybe he sees her inside me. Her eyes glowing from mine. I don’t know which of these I hope to be true, if any.

But sometimes I think he comes to torment me. Pretending to pity me, but wanting to pierce me with his big Indian eyes with their ivory whites and their heavy lids. He’s trying to remind me, like my mole, of who I am. His daughter. His flesh and blood. I am inescapably Indian. Well, if that is his intent, he’s too late. With Parina a part of me, I know I am Indian and I am proud of it. Proud. You can’t give it to me, Dad, because I already have it...and you can’t dangle it before me to taunt me with it because you can’t take it away, either.

Sometimes I think he torments me as if to say, teasingly, you really wanted me. I’m the one you wanted, not Parina. And you know, I would have accepted him instead. That would do. And maybe some day, if he gets too near, if the watchers turn their heads, maybe I will have him too, after all. Then with him and Parina combined, I will be even more Indian than the both of them.

And, within my skin, we three will be a family.

Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Women

1. EVE is a mystery to all who know her name.

2. Since she rose from ‘neath the roses FLORA’s never been the same.

3. HELENA wears her corset so tight her eyes turn black.

4. A kiss from little JILL is a blood-splashing attack.

5. – 63. Heaps of nameless women were all buried in one mass grave.

64., 65., 66. JAN, RENE, and ANN share one man as their slave.

67. LIZ’s squirming babe was fathered by the great Old Ones.

68. When she grew up, CHRISTINE was awfully fond of stabbing nuns.

69. RHONDA likes to flay living sheep with just her teeth.

70. Peeling off her own skin, JODY shows what writhes beneath.

71. – 88. Prettily-painted hookers were trapped when their brothel burned.

72., 73. SHANNON and her half-formed twin won’t say how their pay’s earned.

74. MARIA reads obituaries to lull her kids to sleep.

75. Born without her eyes, CAROL wishes just to weep.

76. JENNY lives inside the corpse of a beached sperm whale.

77. Extracting her own bones, SHERRI built herself a jail.

78. - 203. Most the village wives sneaked off and vanished in one night.

204., 205. Over a sale item, two BETHs killed each other in a fight.

206. Poor befuddled CHRIS has still not figured out that she’s not real.

207. Pounding herself with stones or bricks is JOAN’s attempt to feel.

208. PATRICIA’s never caught a glimpse of the man she married.

209. Gnawing her toes to stubs is what TRISH does when she’s harried.

210. – 223. Witches in a coven plot to overthrow the modern gods.

224., 225., 226. PAM, CELINE and TARA survived the plague against the odds.

227. ERICA suffocated when she woke up on the moon.

228. Even dissected on the slab NAN keeps humming that old tune.

229. – 665. Vikings raiding the suburbs didn’t leave a single mom.

666. At the antiques shop JOY set off an old atomic bomb.

Monsters

There was a man, human, with a gash to the bone across his right cheek, his ear messily bisected as well. His collar was stiff with drying gore but the bleeding had been stopped with a spray, probably at the factory where he had received the injury, though the fissure still needed to be mended and the man was at the triage counter demanding painkillers. Another Earth colonist, his hand wrapped in gauze wet with fresher blood, was also becoming agitated with another triage worker. “I have M-670, you know,” he said threateningly. “You want me to open this?” He plucked at the end of the spooled gauze. “You want me to fling a little of this on you? Yeah?”

Fleck watched a security man wade through the milling people – all of them seeming stunned, even those who weren’t damaged or ill – heading toward the counter with his hand poised over his shock wand, but the shriek of an infant called away Fleck’s attention. He craned his neck, yet couldn’t see where the cry had come from in the thick of the waiting room, where on a large VT screen near the ceiling a commercial aimed at the KeeZee race showed pigs’ disembodied heads with wings sprouting from their temples flying around in a circle singing in a chorus of children’s voices, “Meat-meat, meat-meat...” while a KeeZee boy with a head like a monkey-wrench dipped in skin gaped up at the vision, masticating air in anticipation.

Then, there was another sound that made Fleck forget the cry of the child and the chorus of pigs’ heads. This sound was like both of those in combination: a chorus of piercing screams. There seemed to be three or four voices overlapping, each like the screech of a hawk, but sustained and ululating.

“Here she comes,” said Dr. Midas, standing beside him. They had been expecting this one, having been called down specifically – Midas to head the emergency procedures while Fleck observed, because he had no familiarity with this race. Later, Fleck would perform the reconstructive work himself. He was highly regarded in his field. Midas joked that it was Fleck with his golden touch who should own the older surgeon’s name.

“Oh,” was all Fleck could say, dazed by the sight of the thing as the paramedics half led, half dragged (and was someone even pushing it, hidden behind its bulk?) the being into the ER. They barely squeezed its mass through the double doors. The sound from it increased terribly and Fleck had never seen the cries of one victim draw the attention of all the other patients who waited – often for hours – to be ministered to, distracting them from their own anxieties.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Midas said, smiling.

Fleck looked over at him to see if he were being sarcastic, then looked back at the wounded entity, which despite all the alien races and mutations he had seen in this city since his arrival, eight months earlier, had to be the most hideous sentient life form he had ever set eyes upon.

The monster was somewhat caterpillar-like, an indeterminate number of legs obscured by the bloated segments that pulsed with its labored progress. The brown flesh was dark up front, where the forelimbs and what passed for a head were located, though the long body became more translucent further back, showing layers of fibrous lace beneath the glossy outer skin. Dangling strands and bundled clots of this net-like lace hung out of the gaping wounds inflicted on the creature. A silken embroidered cloth, strapped like a saddle to its back in one place, apparently covered a row of bulbous protuberances. Symbols had been branded into two segments of the grub body, and at the very end of it, a series of apertures were encircled by tattoos.

Midas explained to his colleague, “The tapestry covers some nodules they grow by symbolically implanting a seed they know will inflame the surrounding tissue. Like a pearl growing around a grain of sand. But they have to hide these orbs from the eyes of anyone but their mates. The brands – that one right there is the parents’ family crest, and that one belongs to her impatient fiancé. And the tattoos – heh – they’re a potent curse to anyone who might think about poking around the back door...”

As the paramedics and now some of the ER staff fought to get the creature around the corner of the triage counter and into an off-shooting corridor, the assembly of querulous patients moving very willingly out of its way, Midas pointed toward the vast body and said, “We could theoretically cut her off from that point on – it’s all useless tissue, nothing vital in there that can’t be rerouted – they gorge them for some aesthetic reason, maybe to make them too cumbersome to run away from the males – heh – but then she’d be more disfigured than she already is...”

Fleck saw that the man with the stained, gauze-bound hand stared in horror at the snail trail of blood the entity was leaving across the polished floor. Already, two blankly-determined robots were whisking into the reception area to clean up and disinfect. The blood was pouring down the thing’s flanks from great crusted scabs that the paramedics had no doubt spray-sealed, to little effect. The most serious injuries seemed to be to the head, though without knowing what the head should look like, Fleck couldn’t be sure. It had no face – just a crater, drooling threads of ichor. As alien as the alien was, its life fluid was a disturbingly human red in color.

He had no idea from which places along the body came the hawk-like chorus (oddly, it didn’t seem to emanate from the face crater), though these cries were becoming ragged and tapering away, to be replaced with a wheeze that was just as horrible, if less painful to the ears.

The being was almost into the corridor, and Midas touched Fleck’s elbow to indicate it was time to follow. As they started forward, a stabbing scream caused Fleck to look back toward the front of the sizable waiting area. That unseen infant again, shrieking like an inconsolable ghost child. How could it be that he, a veteran healer – and particularly in a place as full of crying children as the city called Punktown – had not become immune to such a sound?

As he was looking back, Fleck saw that the swimming pigs’ heads had floated off the VT’s screen and were circling the waiting area near the ceiling, even though the commercial had ended and a game show had come back on. They no longer sang, but smiled anthropomorphically. One of the heads drifted down toward a jittery man too nervous to be seated; Fleck guessed that he was overdosed on buttons or even purple vortex. The man’s eyes went wide and he scrambled backwards, bumping into people, turned to flee from the grinning head as it continued to follow him, swooping down very close. A gang kid clutching a scorched ray wound to his shoulder pushed at the addict angrily for bumping into him, and the man fell to the floor, yelping and babbling, “Meat! Meat! Meat!” as the disembodied head bobbed only inches from him. A nurse elbowed through the throng, and used a spray can to mist the man’s body. The spell was broken and the head rose like a released balloon. Another staff member pointed the VT’s remote and touched an ad-banishing button. All of the porcine holographic heads vanished.

“Fleck?” said Midas, waiting in the corridor’s threshold. He nodded at the river of blood. “Watch your step.”

*     *     *

“The Kalians and the Stems do stuff like this to their females, too,” said Dr. Midas, as he worked over the great drugged form that nearly filled Operating Room 17. It lay on a tarp on the floor. Steam rose from one of the wounds he had cleared the thick scabs from. “Deep,” he muttered, “deep.” He resumed what he’d been saying. “A Kalian woman might have acid thrown in her face...if she isn’t stoned to death first...”

“What did she do, doctor?” one of the nurses spoke up.

“Premarital sex, Wanda,” he said. Then he wagged a bloody probe at the nurse. “Let that be a lesson to you.”

“How did they make these wounds on her?” Fleck asked, staring into the well-like injury Midas hovered over. “Some sort of weapon?”

“With their mouths, my boy. Their mouths – like lampreys, with retractable teeth.”

“But who did it to her?” Wanda asked. “Clerics?”

“Her family, Wanda. It was their responsibility to punish her, so as to save face.”

“My God. But how did they feel about having to do that?”

“They must not have felt too badly,” Fleck murmured grimly. “They did it, didn’t they?”

“Were they trying to kill her, ultimately?” Wanda persisted.

“Nope,” Midas said. “Mutilate her, but leave her alive as a warning to all.”

“And her fiancé, who seduced her?” asked Fleck.

“Banished from the community. Disgraced, but intact. He’ll teleport back home, and have to find another community to take him in.”

A deep, rumbling gurgle resonated through the slumbering thing’s body. The vibration actually went through Fleck’s soles, startling him. Disturbingly, it had almost sounded to him like a string of bass tone words. “Is she sufficiently under anesthesia?”

“Don’t worry – just talking in her sleep,” Midas replied. A sizzling sound as he worked, both his hands sunk to their wrists in the wound. “Well, trying to talk. The females’ vocal cords are severed as children.”

“It’s appalling,” Fleck said as if to himself, looking over toward the head area, currently hidden under a cloth. “Unthinkable...”

Midas raised his head, helmeted like the others’. “Still not used to this, are you?”

Fleck felt somewhat embarrassed, kept his eyes from his friend’s as he grumbled, “I don’t ever want to be used to this.”

“Well, I didn’t say you should ever become unconcerned, my boy. But you have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay in Punktown.”

At twenty-eight, Fleck had up until now lived in a smallish Earth colony on a moon of the Tikkihottos’ home world. He had been to their planet for a year as an intern, and while there had seen some ugly sights in emergency wards, but nothing on the scale of Punktown, here on planet Oasis. He had thought the Tikkihottos’ world had been hellish, compared to the sedate colony he called home...but Punktown made that seem like a utopia.

Up until Punktown, his skills as a reconstructive surgeon had been mostly honed by repairing hovercar and industrial injuries, congenital deformities, mutations. By reconfiguring the countenances and bodies of the vain. He had secretly, self-consciously thought of himself as an artist...and he did, in fact, like to paint, though he had seldom showed friends or family his work and displayed none of it openly, even in his own apartment. But here, in Punktown, there was little time for delicacy or finesse. He had had to step up his preferred pace...so as to move one patient out and bring in the next. Assembly line work...

“I hate this,” he said. “All of this. The gang killings. The serial killings. The killings without even a reason of insanity to explain them...”

“Your talents are best served here, Fleck,” Midas said. “This is where you’re needed...exactly because it’s so ugly.”

“How can you stand it, sometimes? Sometimes it must...it has to...horrify you.”

“Well...I worked for a time as an intern in a burn unit for children. We called them – away from the parents, of course – toasty tots.”

“What?”

“We had to, my boy.” Midas lowered his gaze to his patient. “We had to make jokes. We had to go in there every day, have a coffee, and get to work. We had to get past the burnt flesh of children...”

“But you can’t get past it. You can’t. It’s the very thing you’re working on...”

“Well, I guess you can’t get past the burnt flesh,” Midas amended. “It was that they were children, we had to get past.”

*     *     *

The next time they shared an operating room, it was Midas who observed while Fleck worked – rather self-consciously, as if he were at his easel. But Midas assured him, “You’re doing great, on her. Just great. I knew you’d be fine with it...”

The saddle-like tapestry was unbuckled, set aside. While he infused one of the patched-up but still shocking wounds with a solution to engender localized cloning, Fleck raised his eyes to the half-dozen shiny brown nodes along the back and said, “Too sexy, huh?”

“Ohhh, yeah. Please cover them up again, before I dampen my undies.”

“I’d like to see their mouths, that can inflict injuries like these,” Fleck groused, waving a gloved hand over the circular pit.

“No you wouldn’t. Ugly buggers. Small, though, not like our lady. Their mouths are like hers, except she doesn’t have the retractable teeth.”

“Born that way? Or pulled out?”

Midas smiled inside his helmet. “Which do you think?”

“Can’t bite back,” Fleck mumbled.

*     *     *

“I’m sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hand sharply. “Please forgive me if I’m touching you in a way you find inappropriate.”

She occupied a room, Room 40, alone – both beds removed, gym mats placed on the floor for her. It was two days since he had labored over the somnolent monster, and Fleck was checking the progress of his work. Upon awakening the previous day, the alien had begun emitting her multiple hawk cries again until attendants realized it was because her tapestry saddle was removed; several female nurses had then rushed in to replace it. Presently, in running his hands over her glazed, translucent hide, Fleck had found himself stroking one of the wound sites – now only a slightly concave depression – as if to test its soundness. As he had done so, a low but weighty rumble had traveled through the turgid mass that was her body.

Still, she had not begun to shriek again, and she had not thrashed or even flinched. Could she have found his touch...soothing? Gingerly, lightly, he laid his bare hands upon her again, feeling at other areas he had mended with his magic.

“I wish there were an easy way we could communicate. I know you can understand me, at least.” A translating chip on an adhesive disk was stuck to the back of the being’s head. “Do you know how to write any English?” Fleck asked, suddenly hopeful, but his patient made no rumbles in response.

His hands slid gently forward, to her head, and he felt at the skull that had been fractured with blows but fused whole again. The huge orifice was not an excised face, as he had feared in the ER; it was all she had for a visage. The inside of the deep crater was filled with cobweb-like strands that were ever blowing outward on a weak exhaust, a bit chilly and unsettling but at least without scent. He wanted to roll back the one tire-like thick lip, to see the gums from which her rows of lamprey fangs had been pulled, but he had not had to repair in there and felt awkward about examining her in that way.

“I’m told there’s a safe place in the Outback Colony where you’ll be taken in another few days. I’m glad to hear that. I don’t want you to be attacked again.” Still, no thundering noises to acknowledge his words. Uncomfortably, he prattled on, “It’s very tragic...what happened to you. I don’t understand it. How a person can injure anyone in that way...let alone a family member.” He thought better of expressing his personal opinions so candidly, and bit off his words as he concluded his visual inspection of his artistry. All he would say when he finished was, “There – beautiful again, eh?” Without thinking, he patted her flank as though she were a horse. He hoped she understood the smiling expression on his own face.

He was heading for the door, and off to check on the progress of a less exotic patient, when he heard a rolling boom at last behind him. He paused in the doorway to look back. The dormant volcano of a face gaped at him inscrutably, and the tiny brown forelimbs hung idle like the useless arms of a Tyrannosaurus. He waited a few beats, but nothing more.

“Have a good evening,” he told her. “Ring the nurse – that button there, you know – if you need anything...”

He had taken only a few steps down the corridor when his hand phone beeped, and he plucked it from his pocket. A woman on screen said, “Dr. Fleck, you have a call on line 12. Would you like it here or in your office?”

“Emergency?”

“No...well, it’s about your patient in Room 40.”

A newspaper? VT crew? There had been a little bit of media interest in the story; he had even rather proudly bought a copy of a paper that mentioned him and Midas, their work to restore the disfigured being after her harsh punishment.

“I’ll take it in my office, thanks. Be right there...”

*     *     *

When Fleck was seated at his desk and switched his comp on, a bright red logo for Fl’eye Communications instantly leapt off the screen and began to orbit his wrist like a bracelet. He muttered a curse under his breath, his right hand fumbling through a drawer of his desk for a can to spray himself with so as to repel the pesky thing. With his left, he tapped a key to bring up his call. But when he saw the face – or lack of a face – on his screen, he forgot about the parasitic logo.

“Dr. Fleck?” the creature on the screen said, its voice translated into English. The huge O of its mouth, of its entire countenance, did not move. Cobwebs stirred outwards from the thing’s continuous exhalation. Fleck found himself staring into the maw for the dim glimmer of teeth in overlapping rows, but didn’t see any. He almost wanted to hit a magnifying feature, to look more closely...

“Yes,” he replied numbly. He thought of what Nietzsche had said, about the abyss staring also into you...

“It has come to our attention that you are administering reconstructive processes to a female of our kind. A female of my family.”

“Your family...” Fleck echoed.

“We discourage you, in the strongest possible terms, from conducting these procedures.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Fleck said tightly, realizing that he had begun to tremble, “but the procedures are all but finished, and my patient has made a fine recovery considering the severity of the damage that she suffered.”

“Then...we are too late.”

“Yes. She is healed. Sorry, but that’s what we do here.”

“You must undo it, then.”

“What? We don’t undo the work we perform to save people’s lives and make them healthy again. Are you insane? You people...you people should be arrested for what you did.” The forcers were in fact looking for the particular family members who had tortured the female, though the punishment meted out to them might not be too great if they argued passionately enough that it was an important cultural or religious practice. Fleck thought he should trace this call, and surreptitiously fingered a few more keys. In a corner of the screen, the information came up. The being was wisely calling from a payphone at the Canberra Mall.

It stood there immobile, as if embalmed. Just the webs blowing. Judging from the thin neck and boney shoulders, it was somewhat humanoid in form, and almost skeletal...but the voice as translated was bold and strong. “You had no right to interfere in our judgment. You have undone an important ritual that we were bound by our traditions to perform. What you have done is akin to spitting on the steps of one of our temples.”

“I’d rather spit on a temple’s steps than bite huge holes out of a living person’s body!”

“Your arrogance is unforgivable.”

“My arrogance? Mine? Look...who are you? Her brother, her cousin, what?”

“I am her father.”

“Her father? Her father...” He was wagging his head in dumbfounded disgust.

“Justice must be restored...”

“You stay away from her, you hear? Anyway...anyway...she’s already on her way to a place where you won’t find her. Ever. We sent her away yesterday,” he lied.

“Justice must be restored.”

“Bite me,” Fleck snapped, and hit a key, expelling the abyss-faced entity from his screen. Then he realized what he had said. Not so funny, taken in another light.

The eager icon circled round and round his wrist. With a surge of hatred, Fleck plunged his right hand back into the open drawer, located the can, and sprayed his arm as if it were insecticide with which to kill the glowing red parasite. The thing lost his scent, became oblivious to him, drifted up toward the ceiling where it might bob idly like a moth against a lampshade until it finally faded away, an hour or two later.

He placed a call to the hospital’s security office, and talked to the sergeant on duty, a heavy-jawed KeeZee with three impassive black eyes; as nonhuman as he looked, at least he had features. “I want a guard on Room 40 at all times, until whoever is coming to take her away gets here.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Fleck signed off. He discovered that he still held the can of ad repellant in his hand like a gun, his index finger poised upon its button.

*     *     *

After Fleck had reported the call that threatened further violence against his patient, the organization that would give her sanctuary in the Outback Colony, down south, flew two of its people up to Punktown earlier than planned. They arrived the day after the call...first meeting with the being, and then with Fleck. They were both soft-spoken but dedicated-looking Choom women, native to this planet, quite human if one discounted the long lips bridging one ear to the other. One of the women bunched up her cheeks as she raised her great mouth in the bow of a smile.

“She has a final request of you, doctor, but I don’t know if it can be granted before we fly her out tomorrow evening.”

“What is it?”

“The eight orbs along her back...she would like to have them removed by you.”

“Removed?” Fleck was genuinely surprised. And then, oddly pleased. “They’re nothing but scar tissue, really...I’ll have her in an operating room within two hours. And while I’m at it?”

“Yes?”

“Ask her if she wants me to remove her tattoos and brands, too. Piece of cake, those.”

“We’ll do that, doctor. Thank you.”

“I only wish we had time for another surgeon, not me, to reconstruct her vocal organs.”

The Choom woman simply gave an elongated smile tight with regret, and nodded agreement.

*     *     *

As Operating Room 22 was being hastily prepped, Fleck went on to Room 40 to examine his patient with this last task in mind, the Choom women accompanying him. The human security guard on duty, dressed all in black like a forcer, nodded curtly as he admitted them entrance.

Fleck explained to the vast entity that he had agreed to perform the favor she asked, the disk adhering to the back of her skull turning his words into whatever configuration her brain could interpret. She gave a rumble that he took for assent, or understanding, or gratitude. He looked to the Choom women, as if they might translate this noise for him, but they only smiled at him politely. He asked them to be seated on the other side of a screen he pulled out of the wall to give himself and the creature privacy.

Slowly...carefully...reverently, he reached for the buckles to undo the embroidered cloth that cloaked the series of tumor-like growths upon one segment of her upper surface. He had to walk around her body for access to the catches on the other side. In pulling the garment away, he had to tug a bit to get the straps from beneath her, but he was relieved that she raised herself up slightly on her unseen lower limbs to make it easier. She gave a huge shudder that rippled her caterpillar segments – whether from the strain, or mortification, he couldn’t determine.

“There we are,” he said, trying to keep up a casual one-sided conversation, to ease the encounter for both of them.

He held a wand scanner and ran it around the shiny globes, but he also tentatively reached up and touched them with his bare fingertips. The being gave another shudder, and a choked half-rumble, but did not try to shake off his hand...even when he lay his palm upon one of the nodules, feeling its smooth surface under his palm, and palpated it lightly.

When he squeezed, the being thundered inside but with a curious added element like a clattering purr mixed in with it. He saw the faceless head turn as much as it could on its ringed barrel of a neck. “You’re a bit on the coquettish side, aren’t you?” Fleck said quietly, then hoped it hadn’t been translated to her. “That’s what got you into this, isn’t it, my cheeky girl?” He whispered the last bit more softly. But as much as he made a joke of the situation to allay his discomfort, the fact was that he experienced the stirring prelude to his own arousal. He removed his hand and finished up with the wand alone, clearing his throat to give himself a shake.

Soon enough the being was in Operating Room 22, drugged and drifting toward the horizon of sleep like an oil tanker. She was being draped with cloths to isolate the first region he would attend before he worked his way to the nodes – the angry-looking tattooed curses like two-dimensional barbed wire that ringed her several nether openings. The imp of the perverse caused Fleck to imagine what it would be like clutching the caboose of this living train, pressed up to her ardently, but the image was fleeting and quickly subsided. It left him feeling jarred, however – ashamed, unprofessional. What would Midas think of him, if he knew?

Then again, Midas had said she was beautiful. Maybe he had meant it, after all.

Fleck pulled himself up by his bootstraps after that, became all business. The tattoos were deleted in no time, and the skin they had defaced wouldn’t even have to be bandaged. The drapes were rearranged, and next it was time to smooth out the family crests, her family’s and that of her exiled betrothed, who hadn’t been able to wait until after their marriage to seduce her. Fleck took up a stylus-like burning device, similar to the one he had used to erase the tattoos. Despite the more cool demeanor he had forced himself to adopt, he still felt a great satisfaction in eradicating all traces of ownership from his patient’s shining flesh.

*     *     *

Fleck was finishing up after excising the last of the nodules (deposited into a tank of fluid for him to dissect later, out of curiosity) when a siren shrilled to life throughout the hospital. For one jolting moment, Fleck had thought his patient was coming out of anesthesia prematurely and screeching in pain.

“What is it?” he asked, glancing up around him.

Moments later, the voice of the security guard posted outside OR 22 came over a speaker. “Our guard outside Room 40 was just attacked. He was killed. No one saw anything, but they’re going to view the camera record...”

“Dear God,” Fleck breathed, looking again to the slumbering giantess and involuntarily resting a gloved hand against her covered hide as if to reassure her in her dreams.

“Three more men are coming down here to fortify this position. I can’t let anyone leave the room until then. The forcers are being called in to comb the hospital...”

“Alright,” Fleck spoke up in reply. “But we’ve got to get her to the roof shuttles right away. We can’t take a chance. She can convalesce on the flight to the Outback...she’ll be fine, now...”

“Right, doctor...we’ll get a shuttle humming.”

*     *     *

Though he didn’t have to, and his patient wasn’t yet awake for him to say goodbye to, Fleck saw her off as she was loaded onto a medevac shuttle so as to be taken to another, commercial shuttleport – from whence she would be flown with her two Choom benefactors to the Outback Colony for refuge.

Up here, chilly gusts moaned through the rooftops of neighboring tenement blocks with shops glowing colorfully at street level, and twisted like a flock of wailing wraiths between far larger office and apartment structures soaring so high above him that their tops were lost in cold mist. The wind fluttered his pale orange scrubs, ruffled his hair harshly, and even the coffee he held couldn’t warm him...so as soon as the craft had become no more than the other glittering motes floating in the sky, he pushed away from the roof’s blistered parapet to return to his work. He quickened his pace to outdistance an ad in the form of a young woman in skimpy underwear who came swimming toward him off a nearby billboard, no matter how fetching an apparition she was.

He felt terrible about the murdered guard – he’d been told, further, that the man had been killed horribly by several great bite wounds like those from a shark – but he was both relieved and gratified that his patient was now safely beyond the reach of her tormentors. Her family...

As he headed for one of the sheltered rooftop access ports, he saw another shuttle wafting in for a landing, carrying some new bleeding, crying, suffering victim of an accident or – more likely, for this city – atrocious act of violence. Each of the countless wounded passing through this building day after day after day had their own story, lived their own unique but not so unique drama. Could he, should he, try to empathize with them all? Would he ever stop wincing in his heart to see their rent flesh, the flow of their sustaining fluids, the tears on the faces of those that had eyes to shed them?

He descended to his small office, where the tank containing the eight severed orbs waited for him. He sighed, finished off his coffee, and set about extracting one of the cysts from its bath, setting it down, and opening it up with a hissing stylus device for visual inspection.

At its fibrous yellowish core he isolated the irritating seed that had been implanted to provoke this growth...rather surprised to see that it remained there intact, hadn’t broken down. In fact, when he viewed it through magnifying lenses, he saw that the black grain had symbols engraved on it, reminiscent of the branded family crests and the tattooed hexes.

This discovery made him want to pass the knowledge along to Midas, and he wanted to tell him about the being’s personal request from him. Anyway, had Midas been told about the attempt on their patient’s life, her successful evacuation? He glanced at a clock to gauge whether his colleague was on duty, couldn’t recall his current schedule, tried to buzz him here at the hospital. He got a message saying that Midas was not currently in the building. Thus, he tried a call to his home...

Dr. Midas’ home phone was set to a wide-open channel. This meant that any and all callers would immediately be connected. As a result, on his comp screen Fleck saw Midas’ apartment through the older surgeon’s comp screen. And what Fleck saw was Midas staring back at him. His eyes couldn’t be seeing Fleck in turn, however. Midas’s untidily severed head rested upon its ragged stump on the doctor’s blotted green blotter. A white, broken-off fang glinted in the edge of Midas’ torn lower jaw.

“Oh Jesus, oh...oh!” Fleck shouted, rolling back in his chair so abruptly that it ended up toppling over backwards, spilling him to the floor. He scrambled against a wall on hands and knees, turned to steal a peek back at the computer on his desk. The surgeon’s empty gaze had seemed to follow him.

In his home...in his home...

They couldn’t have expected to find their female there...

It wasn’t just her they wanted, then.

Like spitting on the steps of their temple, the father had said...undoing the marks of their justice...

Fleck’s comp started to beep. A call for him trying to get through. He wanted to stand up, rush over and expunge that terrible image from his monitor, but found himself paralyzed. Then, another sound. Was it gunfire? Gunfire outside his window would be nothing new, but it didn’t sound like it came from the streets below. Gunfire even in the ER was not unheard of – addled addicts, or gangs bringing their wars into the hospital that squandered its resources trying to keep them alive for the next turf skirmish. But the ER was four floors below...and this sounded closer...

His office door, unlocked, slid open, and into the room darted a naked dark figure as small as a child – a child’s skeleton. It sprang into a crouch atop the table where Fleck had been performing his biopsy. The tank was knocked to the floor, where it spilled its fluid and the seven remaining strange fruits. Fleck’s dissecting implements went clattering and skittering across the floor as well.

The volcanic crater of a face jerked in his direction. The maw’s webs fluttered wispily. But also, in there, Fleck saw a ring of white teeth rise up from just inside the tire-like lip. There was a gap where one of them was missing, but more rows of teeth waited behind the first. The creature, thin and nimble, bunched itself to spring down at him...and still Fleck was pinned in place by his terror...

Gunshots crashed into the entity, just before it could pounce, blowing it off the edge of the table. It slammed into a wall and convulsed against it horribly, its arms and legs drumming the floor while a spiraling blast of hawk cries whooped from somewhere on its body.

A black-garbed security man stumbled into the room, screaming, with a second of the skeletal things riding his back. Before the guard could point the pistol in his fist backward to blow the thing off him, this second creature clamped its pit of a mouth onto the back of his head. Fleck heard a terrible cracking of bone...and the guard’s screams became a liquid gurgle as he dropped onto his hands and knees.

Fleck’s paralysis was broken. Surgical instruments glimmered icily on the floor, and as he scrambled to his feet he snatched up the stylus he had been using to dissect the cyst. His expert fingers instantly adjusted its invisible beam to its highest intensity.

The thing on the guard lifted its head, the O-mouth streaming blood, tatters of meat caught between its teeth. The guard had sunk onto his belly, splayed, the gaping back of his skull now a mirror of his attacker’s face. Before the being could let go of its victim or rise, however, Fleck lunged forward as if with a sword and the stylus’ beam punched into the side of the entity’s head. He drew his arm downward, and a long wound sizzled open like flesh unzipped, smoking. Blood as vividly red as a human’s sprayed free. Fleck pulled back his arm, but waved the stylus again from the opposite direction. He caught the thing right across its narrow throat. Just as quickly as a wheezing sound started up from the being, it was cut off...as its head flopped backwards, thumped between its shoulder blades, nearly disconnected from the neck. The creature wilted atop the man it had killed.

Fleck straightened, looked across the room at the spasms of the first creature. The alarm siren that now filled the corridors and operating theaters and recovery rooms of this institute of healing blended with the being’s agonized howls. Fleck’s heart was pounding, and he was electrically trembling all over, but he walked toward the thing stiff and composed in appearance....ready to go to work. Ready to end yet another anguished soul’s suffering. He was even smiling slightly. The stylus was hissing in anticipation, like a monster on a chain, leading him along...guiding his hand. Ready to reconfigure both patient and doctor in a single stroke.

October 32nd

I drove home from my second shift job at eleven-thirty PM, during the most depressing part of Halloween night.

This was when the magic drained out of the streets like smoke wisping from a blown out jack o’-lantern. This was when the orange of October threatened to char overnight to the gray-brown of November. With a decisive creak, the earth turned on its axis from autumn toward winter. Yes, the magic was still out there, like a storm front on a weather man’s map, but it was migrating south, toward Mexico, where tomorrow they would have their Day of the Dead. So the gate between the living and the dead was still open...just shifting, like the moon, from one sky to another. The two realms were still in communion, overlapping. Our reality and another, the material and the spiritual, yin and yang.

But in the wet streets my car sloshed through, there was no more festivity. In fact, I had missed it altogether, having gone to the pharmaceutical company where I punched in every day for three PM. But I remembered the holiday clearly, fondly, from my childhood...and I knew what had been lost as the hour trudged – like a trick-or-treater through piles of leaves – toward midnight. It was now just five minutes away, according to my wristwatch with its numbers and hands glowing a faint fungal green.

At least I had had a tease of the magic on my way to work. There must have been a Halloween party at the Brown School. As I passed the old brick Wright Plastics building, where I used to work as an injection molder, I saw four children in Halloween costumes waiting to cross the street. They had their backpacks on and had either taken their masks off entirely or wore them pushed up on top of their heads, but at least I saw the wind-blown cape of a vampire, their bodies under their winter coats shiny orange, satiny purple, glittering green. Even the elderly crossing guard, whom I saw there every afternoon on my way to work, seemed to be in the spirit, wearing a bright orange jacket – though actually he wore that every day, no matter the season.

I had slowed and stopped as the old crossing guard shuffled out into the street, glaring pugilistically at me as though daring me to try to dart through the white lines that barred my way before his charges were safely conveyed through them, as if filing along a narrow bridge that spanned a yawning chasm of black asphalt. But I waited patiently, as always, as he held up his stop sign like a king brandishing his scepter and ushered the children across, like spirits being invited into our world from their own.

I wished I was one of them.

But now, there were no more trick-or-treaters walking these sidewalks I passed alongside. Leaves that had earlier been piled crisp in the gutters, fluttering about in the brisk breeze like locusts, were now soggy, matted into something close to a slime. Thank God for the children the rain had held off into late in the evening, but now it was falling in torrents that pounded my windshield and made it hard for my wipers to brush aside.

A scarecrow sitting in a lawn chair in someone’s front lawn was saturated by the rain, slumped to one side like a dead man in an electric chair. Sometimes, I knew from my own childhood experience, adults dressed as scarecrows and sat still in their yards until unwary kids drew near, and then they would stand or lunge to startle them. This one, however, was most certainly an actual scarecrow...unless the masquerader were asleep. Or dead.

The air was so wet it was as though my car drove along the bottom of a dark sea. Even the inside of my car was damp, as if its air accumulated and bottled the evaporating moisture from every drying out, shriveling, rotting jack-o’-lantern in the town. I saw these pumpkins dimly on door stoops. Their eyes would be imperceptibly but steadily squinting more narrow, their fanged smiles sucking in toothlessly.

Where strings of orange lights had glowed from shrubs, there was bristling blackness. Where windows had glowed with plastic pumpkins and candles, there was gaping blankness. Spooky audiotapes no longer played ghostly wails, howling wolves, crashing thunder.

It seemed, in fact, that I was the only person alive in these streets.

I did see another car as I drew nearer to the center of town, however. But rather than being someone coming home from work, I suspected they were coming home from a Halloween party at which they’d imbibed too many festive fluids, because the small white car was driving backwards through a crosswise street that intersected with the one I was on. I decelerated , thinking that the vehicle was reversing carelessly so as to turn into my street, perhaps having overshot the intersection...but as I crawled closer I saw no sign of the careless driver down that side road, and I continued on my way.

I tried to raise myself from my depression at having missed Halloween by considering that there might still be some horror movies playing on cable. I glanced at my dashboard clock, noted that it was ten to midnight. Sure, I thought, a couple had to be playing, still. I’d make some microwave popcorn, settle into my couch with all the lights out except for my flickering hearth of cathode blue.

Ahead now I could make out the top of the old brick Crone Plastics building, where I used to be a maintenance worker. The nearby Gray School would be silent and shut at this hour, but I saw that the elderly crossing guard had stayed on late or had arrived early for his next shift. He was hard not to notice in his orange jacket that shone in my headlights. Without children to watch over, he did not glare at me challengingly, did not even look at me as I passed him, just stood there with his stop sign hanging at his side, the rain exploding off his shoulders and his gray hair plastered to his skull.

I had noticed only moments ago that my gas was running low, though I could have sworn I’d filled up the tank only that afternoon. Maybe I had a leak. In any case, I pulled into the gas station just beyond the Crone factory...but no one came from inside at the sound of the bell, the interior all dark except for illuminated signs advertizing motor oil and the like. I’d have to take care of it tomorrow, then. I pulled back onto the road to continue on toward home.

The detritus of the holiday was still sadly in evidence around me. On someone’s front lawn, a soggy scarecrow had fallen out of a lawn chair to lie on its face like a drowned man. How clever, I thought, if it were really an adult in costume, diligently waiting for a last trick-or-treater to come along, or a car like mine, so as to leap suddenly to his feet and give me a start. I watched it out of the corner of my eye as I splashed by in the flume of the street, but the sodden mannequin did not so much as raise its head.

The rain had stopped and the streets of town were now filled with a damp fog so thick one would think it had blown in off Lake Pometacomet, though that was too far from the town center to be the case. Street lights glowed as if buried in mountains of cotton, though there were no mock candles or garlands of orange bulbs to restore to the town the costume of fantasy it had worn while I’d been spending eight tedious hours in the printing company I worked for.

I slowed as I neared a street that crossed mine, because I could see a vehicle passing along it. But as the vehicle, a dark green van, cut across, I realized it was moving backwards. What a stupid, probably drunken stunt to pull. Probably teenagers. It was a good thing no kids were still on the streets trick-or-treating. As I came up on the crosswise street, I looked down its dark length and saw the headlights receding into the distance until swallowed in the thick boiling mists.

The fog was slowing my progress. I looked at the softly glowing blue face of my digital watch and saw that it was a quarter to midnight. I hoped I’d get home in time to catch at least the end of a horror movie, preferably some older classic. I had some Jiffy Pop I could cook right over the burner of my stove like my father had made for me as a child.

Through the rolling plumes of fog, I began to make out the body of the old Driscoll Plastics building where I’d once been a customer service rep, its bricks glistening like dragon’s scales in the street lights. Where the crosswalk cut across the black of the road, I saw the elderly crossing guard waiting patiently for the children that would be walking to the Black School after dawn had risen. He sat in a lawn chair like a king on his throne, holding his scepter of a stop sign across his knees, but he only looked at me calmly, expressionlessly, as I drove past him. I considered waving but decided that he might think I was being facetious.

I sighed morosely as I rode on through the night, feeling like a paleontologist who had come too late to the sighting of a live dinosaur, finding only its feces instead. Much as I tried to console myself with the promise of TV and popcorn, I knew the true magic had dissipated. I was in that limbo between night and midnight, which was technically the start of day. That purgatory between Halloween and Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s, none of which meant quite as much to me. I felt cheated, even resentful. Every day was so bland, so redundant, a never-ending loop of punching in, punching out, waking up, turning in, dressing, undressing, driving to my job at the electronics company, then driving home. On the one night of the year when the walls seemed to come down, the rules melted away, when reality became skewed, I had missed it all, a prisoner chained in the dungeon of the mundane.

At least my favorite gas station was open tonight, I noticed as I drove past, first glancing at my gauge to make sure my tank was full. The interior was lit, though I couldn’t see much of the counter man from my angle – just a bit of his shoulder and one arm. Still, it made me feel a little less alone tonight.

On I went, bitter that I had to go to work the next day as if nothing special had ever happened, but at least grateful that my second shift hours permitted me to stay up late watching TV. It was a faint solace that I clung to, as I drove by the dark houses with their dark windows, dark pumpkins, that house with a mound of leaves and empty strewn clothing in its front yard, the guts and flayed skin of a dismantled scarecrow.

It was a good thing that I stopped at an intersection close to the town’s center; a motorcycle roared through without even hesitating at the stop sign. It wasn’t until it had plunged into fog that swirled in its wake, however, that I had the impression that not only had there been no rider on it, but that it had been racing backwards.

I must be tired, but I was determined not to go straight to bed when I got home, and thus admit defeat utterly. I glanced at my dashboard clock. It was twenty minutes til midnight, and I was going to milk the tail end of Halloween for all it was worth. Though I had no popcorn at home, I could still plunk myself down and nibble on chips or half stale doughnuts as I caught the last horror movies of the night.

As I drew steadily closer to home, by habit I slowed my speed when I came up on the old brick Howland Plastics factory where I was once a machine adjuster. The crosswalk was empty, of course, the Red School many hours away from unlocking its doors. The elderly crossing guard had probably been the one to leave that lawn chair on the sidewalk (yes, I saw his paddle-like stop sign resting on it), but I was sure right now he was snuggled in his bed, or perhaps watching those late night horror flicks himself.

Peripherally I noticed something as I rode across the twin white stripes, and I glanced up into my rearview mirror. At the opposite side of the street, as if waiting to cross, there had been a small figure in a shaggy dark costume. A child dressed as a gorilla, or a werewolf? But out so late at night? Could he be a trick-or-treater who’d become lost in the maze of the town, still trying to find his way home? The mists that billowed in my wake quickly occluded the vision, and I decided my first impression was unlikely; I must have projected my imagination onto a shrub or a fire hydrant.

Still, I decided that maybe I should turn around to investigate. Besides, a peek at my gas gauge reminded me that I was running low. My favorite gas station was ahead, and the lights were on inside its little convenience store. I pulled up to one of the pumps, and cut my engine. Even as I lowered my window there was already a man standing so close to my door that I couldn’t see his face. I asked him to fill me up, and without a word he shuffled around to the back of my car, where I heard him fumbling open the cover, fumbling in the spout.

Funny that it took less time to fill my tank than I would have thought. Maybe my gauge was faulty. The counter on the pump read just five dollars, so I dug it from my wallet and held it out my window like a candy bar for a trick-or-treater. I saw the attendant in his reflective orange jacket moving toward me to retrieve the bill.

Though I couldn’t see his face from this angle, something strange hung down the front of his body. It looked like the skinned hide of a dog. I leaned forward a little and tilted my head to look up at the man as he planted himself directly outside my door again.

The elderly man in the orange jacket had the end of that flayed hide in his mouth, as if he were sucking it in slowly. But it wasn’t a skinned animal hide, I realized as I saw it close up. It was a shaggy werewolf costume with no child inside it. Any longer.

I handed the man his bill and rolled up my window as quickly as I could. I didn’t like the glaring, challenging look in his eyes as he sucked in another inch of the costume.

I didn’t turn around at the gas station, after all. I pulled my car back onto the street to continue on toward home.

It was only eleven-thirty, after all, and I might still catch the end of a horror movie on cable if I hurried.

I refused to let go of the night’s magic. I was determined to have my share.

The Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism

Hello, pretty maid. I may be a monk, but I'm also a man.

– From the Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism

1: The Inn

The first examples of Korean masks that Brian Ford saw were miniature brown faces, contorted into exaggerated expressions, presented in a frame on a wall of the reception area of the little inn in the Jung-gu section of Seoul.

Initially, he glimpsed the display more or less peripherally as he booked himself in at the front desk. He had been picked up in a van by the owner of the inn – which was referred to in the pamphlet he had been given as a “guest house”. A worker in a downtown tourist information station, responding gently to the Westerner’s obvious breathless befuddlement, had given him the pamphlet – suggesting the guest house to him for its low cost – and had even gone so far as to call the place for him. By Korean won, which he had traded his American dollars for at a currency exchange booth in Incheon International Airport, he figured the cost to be less than $40 a night. Now he was grateful that the big hotel he had tried first, before going next door to the information center to look into other options, had been booked solid.

Heavily loaded with his backpack and suitcase, he had tripped on a little elevated step upon entering that big hotel, plunging into its revolving door on hands and knees. An attendant had rushed to his aid but he had already gathered himself up by then. He assured the attendant he was okay, yet in the days that followed an ugly dark bruise developed on his tender right knee. The attendant apologized about the hotel being full, and Ford embarrassedly felt him watching in concern as he exited more carefully through the same revolving door.

He thought that his stumbling into the revolving door was an apt analogy for the situation that had befallen him – his arrival in Vietnam from Korea, and his swift deportation back to Korea until he might attempt to gain entry into Vietnam again once his faulty visa issue was resolved...

Ford was given a moment’s tour of the inn’s downstairs, which consisted of showing him the little kitchen area around the corner from the reception desk – this room doubling as an internet center, with two computers on a counter and a little kitchen table upon which he was invited to make toast in the morning. There was a coffee maker and its contents were complimentary, for which Ford was very grateful; he had enough figurative headaches already without worrying about actual headaches from caffeine withdrawal. He had feared that the mystical Orient would be a land dominated by tea, which he disliked.

On a partial partition separating the kitchen from a carpeted hallway, Ford saw another display of framed masks, this one long and vertical where the larger display opposite the reception area had been square, the masks in this one even smaller than those in the first.

Branching from the carpeted hallway were several narrow corridors; he was led into one of these, which quickly ended in steps ascending to a second storey. The carpeted steps were steep and seemed designed for a much shorter foot than his own size 13. Directly at the top was his room, 201, and he was let in.

Downstairs, he had noticed that one needed to step up onto a slightly elevated tiled area to enter the kitchen, and that some pairs of shoes and sandals had been left near its edge. He asked if he must remove his shoes before stepping onto the raised floor of the kitchen, but was told no...only in his room. As he now stood looking into room 201 with his host, he saw that there was a small space just beyond the door where he might leave his shoes before stepping up onto the pristine polished wood of the little room’s floor. He was reminded of the elevated area that had tripped him at the large hotel, and of a branch of the American Dunkin’ Donuts coffee chain that he had been delighted to discover back at Incheon Airport, which also had a raised platform-like floor one needed to step up onto. This subtly alien, subtly exotic arrangement regarding something so mundane as the floor one trod upon struck him as Japanese-like, since he knew more about Japan than he did Korea.

He was soon left to his own devices, as he liked it, and locked himself into room 201. He wasn’t at all inconvenienced by leaving his shoes near the door; he welcomed removing his feet from them after these many, many hours spent aboard four planes, and in three countries, and walking the streets of a country he had never planned to spend more than a couple hours in.

The room was small, spare, clean, bright. An oval mirror hung over a little desk, on top of which was a smallish TV and under which was a tiny fridge. Above the similarly smallish bed was a window with an air conditioner in it, and a fan mounted on the wall, though the temperature here was as mild as it was back home. In Korea, it was also autumn, also October...

He found that there was no bath tub in the bathroom, nor even a shower stall, though there was a spray hose mounted on one tiled wall. The floor was tiled as well, with a drain in its center, and the best he could figure was that one must stand or squat in the plastic basin he saw stored under the sink, spray oneself, dump the water from the basin and let the rest of the sprayed water simply run down the drain in the floor.

There was a little window above the sink, and like the one set rather high above his bed, it had been left open to let in air. But Ford was concerned about insects carrying viruses he might not have been vaccinated against also being let in, so he moved to close this window as he had done with the first. As he stepped onto the red-tiled floor, currently dry, he saw a pair of rubber sandals had been left for him but they were inches short of his foot size.

The window proved to have a bewildering and indeterminate number of frosted panes that slid on aluminum tracks, the last of the many layers being a mesh screen. He ended up sliding about half of the panes to the right and leaving the other half on the left. Before he did so, however, he leaned forward to have a look at his view.

Adjacent to the guest house was a brick building that formed a narrow, dark alley studded with the air conditioners of other of the inn’s occupants. Directly below was the tar paper roof of a projecting section of the brick building’s ground floor level. Beyond the brick building loomed another, taller brick building, mostly blocking anything else he might have seen. Simply from gazing out this window, he would not have guessed that he was looking upon another country, the first other than the United States that he had ever set foot in.

Ford returned to the main room, and opened his suitcase on the stand provided as if to unpack, but he soon found himself turning on the TV and stretching out on the bed. The mattress proved to be quite hard, but he actually preferred them that way. He knew he had to recharge, after all he’d been through...the flight from Boston to Dallas, the interminable stretch from Dallas to Korea (the plane a time machine traveling forward from October 2 to October 3 as it skated across uncounted time zones), the flight from Korea to Vietnam, the brief hour or two spent in Vietnam before he was forced to fly back to Korea for having the wrong date accidentally printed on his visa, the shuttle bus from Incheon International Airport to the domestic Gimpo Airport across a rather bleak brown landscape with a horizon of large hills or small mountains under a white overcast sky, the taxi from Gimpo into the thick of Seoul and there to the Vietnam Embassy (which the driver had a hard time locating on a twisty, hidden back street), his applying for a new visa and fatalistically accepting the news that it would take three days to process it, walking numbly out onto the streets of Seoul lugging his heavy suitcase with his backpack weighing on him in search of lodgings, hailing a cab to take him to a hotel in the bustling and very Western heart of Seoul, finding the hotel full, learning about this guest house at a tourist information center near the hotel, and now...here he was, lying in a bed for the first time since he had risen, in Massachusetts, to shower in anticipation of his trip to Logan Airport.

He had been stunned by the blow in Vietnam, and stumbling along from one obstacle to the next ever since, literally thinking on his feet. Now, he allowed that blow to bring him to blessed unconsciousness at last. At least his dreamland should prove to be familiar territory.

2: The Girl

Ford slept from around 2 PM to, he saw when he put a light on, 11 PM. He hadn’t slept for so many hours straight, even in the US, for he couldn’t recall how long. He felt refreshed, and guardedly optimistic. He was as yet undaunted, determined not to be deterred from the mission he had set for himself.

He was tempted to creep downstairs and use the computer to email An again, but decided he didn’t want to risk awakening any other guests or the guest house’s owner. It could wait until the morning; anyway, he had emailed An from an internet café inside Incheon Airport to explain more thoroughly what he had barely been able to get across to her initially about his plight – having borrowed a mobile phone from one of the Vietnamese immigration officers as he was X-rayed with a wand by a security officer, before being hustled onto the Korean Airlines flight that was being held for him as if he were a criminal of great importance.

Instead of leaving room 201, he decided to watch TV for a while, either until daylight came or he fell asleep again...though first he showered (again, for the first time since home) in the manner he had determined to be the accepted approach.

Prior to showering he had tuned to a Korean home shopping channel selling lingerie, the camera swimming in close over the flesh landscapes of scantily clad women both Caucasian and Asian, but before he returned to the TV he decided to slide open the panels of the little window over the sink and gaze out for the first time into this country’s night.

As the cool night air wafted into his face, Ford noted that there was light in the second floor window of that tall brick building across the street from the inn. If there were other windows alight on that floor, they were blocked by the intervening building, leaving only the one closest to the corner of the structure exposed. The upper part of the window was blocked with newspaper, apparently taped on the inside and perhaps to shield the glare of sun in the day.

He saw a woman in the window, busily occupied. She was using an iron in quick, sure strokes, its spiral cord hanging from above. He couldn’t determine if he were looking into a laundry service or a garment factory. The woman seemed to iron one plaid garment after another – unless it was the same one that she kept flipping over, placing aside, then retrieving for another round of ironing. He felt it more likely that it was a factory, however, and that she was working on a series of plaid skirts or perhaps men’s flannel shirts; it seemed to him that she was ironing a strip of the plaid fabric onto a larger portion – maybe heat-gluing it in place? He had no clear notions of how clothing was manufactured.

Beyond her he saw only a portion of another woman, who would move in and out of view, and it was apparently she who placed a bundle of something near the ironing woman from time to time, unless that was a third worker. A second shift, then. He himself worked a third shift back home, and could relate to these nocturnal creatures, laboring industriously while others dreamed.

As if watching a TV screen with the sound muted, he continued regarding the girl’s fast, almost nervous, movements...his actual TV droning on behind him incomprehensibly. The dark of the bathroom kept his own window in gloom and he never saw her look across at him. She never seemed distracted from her work. At times, the other woman or women disappeared utterly from view and the ironing woman seemed oddly alone to him.

She was young, and wore a maroon top and blue jeans, her sleeves pushed up her slim arms and her black hair in an appealing ponytail. When she leaned forward too far, her shirt pulled up to reveal some of the skin of her back. She looked intense, and from here she looked pretty. He found he felt an odd fondness for her, in that she reminded him of pretty Asian workers at his own place of employment. He had watched those women many times in their work, and in the cafeteria, but had never been able to date any of them. He had once passed a note to a married Vietnamese woman in the cafeteria at the end of their lunch period, before fleeing back to his department so she could unfold and read it in his absence. In it, he told her how attracted he was to her. A few suspenseful days later, she had come to his department and told him she was flattered by the note but that she was married; she had even shown her husband the note rather proudly, and he had told her she should keep it as a memento. Apparently they both saw it more as an expression of praise than of romantic intent. Confused and embarrassed, Ford had not conveyed any more of his feelings for her since.

The incident had reminded him of how, twenty years earlier, he had passed a similar love note to a pretty teenage Asian girl who worked in the town library. Though he had left his phone number on the note, she had of course never called him.

He felt more confident – or at least, less intimidated – writing his feelings rather than uttering them, and so it was that he had been able to strike up a relationship with an Asian woman at last via the internet. He had met An, who lived in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, through an online dating service. They had emailed each other back and forth for six months until finally he had made use of his three weeks vacation and his savings to plan a trip to visit her. Over time, they had gone from affectionately calling each other “anh” (you, male) and “em” (you, younger person) to, playfully and romantically, “ong xa” (husband) and “ba xa” (wife).

Friends and family had warned him, concerned, that this girl – much younger than himself, and perhaps too sexy in her poses and attire in the photos on the dating service site – was merely after a green card, only using him as a ticket to the US. One Vietnamese coworker had even advised him that An could be a prostitute, claiming that many poor girls in Vietnam resorted to selling their bodies. Ford had tried to convince them (and himself?) that she had true feelings for him. Yes, he was certain her initial goal had been to find a Western man. But his initial goal had been to find an Asian woman. The point was: of all the people in the world, they had narrowed their choices down to each other.

But he had been ejected from her country, rejected, and thus delayed...and so here he was, gazing somewhat covetously at a busy Korean factory girl instead of into the eyes of his would-be Vietnamese ba xa.

After a time his mind drifted from the pretty young woman’s monotonous movements, and in fresh boxer shorts only, he left the bathroom and plopped back on his little bed’s firm surface, pointing the remote at the television again.

The cable offering was very good, and he found himself surfing through a wide loop of programs as he would at home. Briefly, and with surprise, he watched a stand-up comedy show from the US, with Korean subtitles, but he preferred to observe their own programming. It proved pretty Western, not as exotic as he might have expected. Listening to their language, and glimpsing their world through the admittedly unreliable lens of television, he again couldn’t help comparing them to the Japanese; their modern culture seemed very “pop”. He liked the way the women spoke as if they were singing, especially when they trailed off at the end of their utterances.

He was delighted to see a commercial advertising candy for Halloween; Halloween in Korea! It was his favorite holiday, and its apparent acceptance here was unexpected. The commercial featured a lovely young Korean woman in a witch’s black hat and outfit, but wearing a long blond wig.

He viewed a string of music videos and concluded that Koreans liked their videos in the form of little movies, highly melodramatic, their women crumbling into tears throughout. When not weeping, Korean women were portrayed to him – largely through commercials – as exceedingly cute, whimsical creatures, silly and child-like. But then he chanced upon a very erotic movie that he would classify as a hard R-rated, bordering on soft porn. A fairly grim plot involving murder was mere buffer between endless sexual situations that almost had Ford groaning in self-pity. Would this be him in a few days, if he could return successfully to Vietnam, An’s legs wrapped around him like that, An’s face contorted in bliss? Finally he could endure the movie’s torments no longer, and switched to a documentary on octopuses, whose more stolid activities soothed him.

Still, he reflected that the teary women in the videos, the frolicking hip creatures in the commercials, and the sweat-drenched nude vixens in that rather dated-looking soft porn movie all taken together conveyed a heightened sense of femininity, a trait Ford attributed to Asian females and which was one of the elements that most drew him to them...however terribly mawkish those videos, and overly cutesy those commercials. In his perception, native-born Asian women embodied all the stereotypical feminine qualities, turned to volume 11. Gracefulness, physical beauty, devotion to their men and their children, but also negative stereotypical qualities like cattiness, jealousy, and vanity. Over the years, he had been most beguiled by foreign and non-Caucasian women (women from India, black women, Hispanics, but most particularly Asian women) because of their very foreignness. To him as a man, women were already a mystifying alien species, and adding another culture or even race into the equation only seemed to pump up the male/female dynamic to a more extreme level of intensity.

He got up several times, once to attack a cockroach on the ceiling with a complimentary can of hair spray. Poisoned and shellacked, it dropped to the floor but vanished before he could crush it with something other than his bare foot. Another time, he returned to the bathroom to urinate, and found a very odd insect in the toilet, with long rowing frog-like arms. He flushed it down the drain, but felt vaguely sorry that he had thus far killed two Korean animals (or maybe just one, as the body of the first had not been discovered).

Sliding aside the frosted window panels again, he saw that the window of the factory had gone dark. Second shift had ended, then. He felt a bit disappointed, and lonely. Except for the insects he had battled, that distant woman had been his only companion...but she had been as far removed from him as An was. He shut the window and returned to the TV to find a wrestling program hosted by Koreans but in which the wrestlers all seemed Caucasian. Currently, and freakishly, an obese white man in a baseball cap, shabby blue jeans and work boots was wrestling with a blond woman dressed in leather. Though he didn’t care for wrestling, Ford gaped numbly at the screen as the slovenly fat man slammed the sexy woman onto her back and fell heavily atop her.

3: Horrorwood

It was the vast eyes that drew Ford’s attention to the tall, modern building; they stared down at the streets of the shopping district Myeong-dong from the side of a multi-floored department store called Migliore. Though the rest of the huge advertisement was in Korean characters, the one English word HORRORWOOD dripped in red letters above the eyes, which had blue irises...something Ford, whose own eyes were blue, felt was rather odd considering the country he was in.

He had worked his way to this looming Western-style section of the great city through smaller side streets flanked with more modest places of business. These narrow streets were hilly, sometimes surprisingly so, and he wondered how cars made it up these slopes when it had snowed. He further wondered if the motorcycles that buzzed about, often on the sidewalks (he had quickly learned to be ready to dodge to one side at a moment’s notice), hibernated through or braved winter weather.

The architecture of Seoul – whether back or main street – amazed him. There were plenty of brick buildings and bland concrete apartment complexes (these, the result of Seoul’s massive rebuilding after the Korean War?), but encroaching on the sidewalk there would suddenly be an older, more traditional building capped by a pagoda-like roof with upturned corners. When the taxi driver had driven him from Gimpo Airport to the Vietnam Embassy, they had gone past an awesome walled palace or fortress, and elsewhere – in a downtown area filled with contemporary, gleaming business towers – the old South Gate of the city had risen on a steep green mound in the center of the street like a fabled temple on an island. While dwarfed by the more modern high-rises around it, the two-tiered ancient structure had still conveyed to him a sense of majesty perhaps even greater in power.

Having remained awake all night, waiting anxiously for a reasonable hour to venture forth, he had crept down to the otherwise unoccupied kitchen area at 6 AM, and had been immensely grateful for the freshly brewed coffee he found there. He sat before one of the two computers, and was soon reading his email. An had sent him a message, again expressing her disappointment, sadness and confusion about his nonappearance in Saigon. She also expressed doubt that he would show up and fulfill her dreams, after all. He wrote some lines to reassure her:

“I am determined to get to you, ba xa, trust me. I’ve come too far to turn back now. I keep surprising myself; I’ve never even been to Canada before this trip, and I haven’t flown anywhere in 14 years, but I keep rising to every challenge that gets thrown in front of me. I’m staying calm and keeping a positive attitude. Are you proud of me? :-) But believe me, I am going to KILL that travel agent when I get back home.”

The travel agency had been recommended to him by several of his Vietnamese coworkers, as being run by a Vietnamese couple. The price had been good, but he was no longer fond of the soft-spoken young Vietnamese woman who had arranged his flight for him, though at the time he had been dazzled by her beauty and uncanny gray eyes (he had finally summoned the strength to ask if they were tinted contact lenses, and they were; he had told her they were pretty – the extent of his shy flirtation).

An had fretted, maybe not so jokingly, that he would meet some nice Korean girl during his few days in Seoul, and he almost chuckled aloud, “I wish” as he again reassured her, citing the chores that would be occupying him. “I still need to buy two new tickets,” he wrote, “to replace the one I already used going to Vietnam, and the one they took to pay for my flight back to Korea. That, and $30 for the new visa. Argh! I read in a book they gave me at the tourist center that I can access my bank account through global ATMs in convenience stores or the subway – I hope so, because this is more than I budgeted for!”

But he had several days to kill before the new visa would be ready, and he was not as yet in a hurry to complete his errands, so his first mission upon setting out on foot had been to grab a bite to eat. He was familiar with Vietnamese food from restaurants back home, but not Korean cuisine, so he didn’t gamble on any of the places that featured only Korean writing in their signs. At last he had bought a very tasty egg sandwich and a strong espresso at the homey-sounding Joe’s Sandwich. Around the corner from Joe’s and across a wide and busy street, he had spotted the rearing department store Migliore with the sign advertising HORRORWOOD, whatever that was.

One way to find out. The street looked too intimidating to cross, so he descended into the subway with the thought to ascend on the other side. This, he saw, as he cut through the station with its tiny mall-like shops, had been the wise course of action. He emerged virtually in the shadow of Migliore, and worked his way closer to it. Was HORRORWOOD an advertised movie, a TV special? A festival, a miniature theme park? He hoped it was an area of the store itself, devoted to Halloween costumes and decorations and the like. The thought of Halloween’s nearness made him a bit homesick, though he knew he would be home from his vacation before the holiday actually arrived.

By some elevators inside he saw a listing of the various levels, indicating that HORRORWOOD was located on the 8th floor, so he entered one of them and punched the appropriate button. He rode with a group of other passengers, all of whom got out at various floors before he reached his. He felt a bit awkward confined in the elevator’s cramped cabin with them. He had already determined, today, from passing so many Koreans in the street, that they were a very reserved people, not dazzled by the sight of a Westerner even though he had only glimpsed two other Westerners (eating in the sandwich shop) so far in Seoul. Pedestrians had seemed not only to avoid eye contact, for the most part, but inclined to act like he didn’t even exist, keeping their faces closed and – to his mind – dour and mask-like. Occasionally a man or woman had met his eyes, and he had nodded in greeting to one stern-looking middle-aged man but there had been no reaction. Well, what had he expected – that the populace would drop to their knees and worship the Great White God who had fallen from the sky? This was the eminent city of Seoul, not some rural Vietnamese town where the local girls might want to marry a Western man to escape their lives of poverty.

He had experienced no outright hostility, though he had feared there might be some resentment, as America was extra unpopular right now due to the war upon Iraq. But he needn’t be perceived as an American, necessarily, right? He could be a German, a Brit, for all they knew. The cab driver who had taken him to the embassy had asked him where he came from, and when he told him the USA, the driver had thrust up his thumb and exclaimed, “Good number!” An encouraging reaction. The people he had needed to interact with had all been friendly and helpful. Again, what did he expect...that each pedestrian, and each person riding the elevator with him, would break into a wide grin and seize his hand in welcome to their country?

He stepped off the elevator on the 8th floor, and instantly saw that he was the only one here.

The walls of the corridor had been painted to look as if they were made of mortared stone. He walked across the empty, polished floor to a door, and – hoping he didn’t set off a whooping alarm that would summon security guards (or those dreaded Vietnamese immigration officers again in their brown Cub Scouts uniforms) – he tried to open it. It was locked.

He surveyed the dimly-lit tunnel of the hallway again. So it was a walk-through ghost train sort of entertainment, then? When it was operating, this hallway must be filled with eager young people waiting in line, clutching each other’s arms in delicious anticipation. But without whatever smoke and mirrors might be employed here, and the crackling anticipation of the patrons, the mock stone hallway was mundane, unimpressive, lonely.

Returning to the elevators, he found a sign partly in English that said the attraction would open at 11 AM. He saw by his watch that it was not even ten; he had thought it might be later, but then he had set out on the streets early, over two hours ago already. He glanced back down the hallway rather longingly. Should he go downstairs, explore the various levels of the store and return in an hour? As much as he wanted to, he decided not to give HORRORWOOD a look. He was a bit shy about the idea of waiting in a crowded queue and going through such an attraction companionless, here in an alien country. Maybe he’d come back before he left for Vietnam, he told himself...as he punched the button for a lone elevator standing apart from the others.

When the doors opened, Ford and a middle-aged woman surprised each other, she getting off as he got on. He realized from her pail and mop that she was a cleaning woman and this was a service elevator. She smiled at him shyly, nervously, as they passed, and he smiled back at her – guilty for having startled her, for being someplace he shouldn’t and using the inappropriate lift. Still, he rode it down to the next floor, where he got off to switch to an elevator reserved for customers...somewhat frustrated with himself that even selecting the correct elevator had become a hurdle for him on this, the other side of the world.

4: The Mask

On the street again, he took to letting his feet carry him pretty much where they would. He had decided to travel light, bringing his backpack but keeping it all but empty. He had brought his sunglasses and he put them on now, not so much for protection from the sun as to obligingly hide his too-bold blue eyes from the solemn dark eyes of uncomfortable pedestrians. If they were inclined to pretend they didn’t see him, then the dark glasses made him feel all the more like the Invisible Man.

He passed people who’d set up tables on the sidewalks to sell heaps of vegetables...steaming food on sticks...stacks of dried, mummified squid...cooked octopus arms almost as thick at their base as Ford’s wrist. Sunglasses, rugs, cheap jewelry, chintzy toys, souvenirs. Amongst the latter he saw some wooden masks that looked like full-sized versions of the framed little faces back at the guest house. He would have liked to stop to look at them, because he was very drawn to masks. In import stores in the US he liked to examine wooden masks from Ghana and Kenya, and at home above his computer he had hung a rectangular, primitive wooden face from Indonesia with protruding eyes, sharp teeth and a circle or halo attached to its top; he had no idea of its significance. He owned a molded iron decoration that had been painted with the pretty ghost-white countenance of a woman to resemble a Japanese No mask. Years ago he had hung several porcelain masquerade-style masks, wildly painted and streaming ribbons, but they seemed too gaudy to him now. Despite his interest in these Korean masks, however, he restrained himself – he needed to conserve his money for his “true” vacation in Vietnam.

He wandered from the broad main streets back into the maze of smaller, side streets. He walked past many courtyards, closed off by metal gates. He worked his way up steep, alley-like passages – a few times dead-ends so that he had to retrace his steps. Huffing his way up the steepest street yet, his feet beginning to ache in the stiff new black shoes he had bought only days before his flight, he saw a group of elderly blind people with canes, some of them holding hands to guide each other, gingerly working their way down. Apparently they lived in a home sadistically located on this terrible slope. On one building’s gray wall he saw a ragged old poster advertising the DVD or video for a horror movie he recognized as Freddy vs. Jason, though the writing was all in Korean.

Even in the most twisted and desolate back alley, Ford never felt that he was in physical danger, no matter how chilly the passersby might seem in this city. He felt safer here than he did in the cities back home.

He came upon an open market area that a banner strung across the street identified as Namdaemun Market. It was a maze in itself, of crowded stalls selling everything from clothing to imitation designer handbags to children’s toys, the streets comprising the market thronging with people. Ford found himself getting lost in the labyrinth of goods, doubling back through the same streets until he finally worked his way out.

Off one of the busier main arteries again, a familiar sight drew Ford excitedly. Rows of bright orange, plastic jack-o’-lanterns. Stacks of black conical witch’s hats. A bucket bristling with bloodied axes, swords, pitchforks. And cheap rubbery faces hanging on a board with metal pegs through their eyes: a gorilla, a hideous old woman, a shiny red devil, various skull-like or decayed toothsome zombies. Ford smiled. Halloween in Korea! He wondered how many of them got into it, how many of their children actually trick-or-treated (for dried squid and octopus arms?). After examining the outside displays, he entered into the little store itself.

Candles, decorations, plastic bugs; nothing that he wouldn’t find at home, but that was what charmed him. He didn’t feel so much like he was missing out on October’s Halloween atmosphere, now; this made up a bit for the HORRORWOOD let-down.

One of the shop’s workers was keeping an avid eye on him, either for fear that he might steal something or out of eagerness to make a sale. Ford glanced at him and smiled, and pointed to the stairs at the back of the gift shop. “Can I go up?” he asked. The worker nodded, smiled, invited him to do so with a gesture. Ford went to the stairs, and the worker followed after him.

“Ahh,” he said, as he reached the second level. An abundance of costumes in plastic bags, and a wide array of masks covering one entire wall. The worker hovered behind him as he moved forward to study the ranked, macabre faces more closely. Again, an army of desiccated ghouls. The ubiquitous mask from the movie Scream. The grinning green mask from the movie The Mask. Werewolves, grim reapers. Images of Western horror.

But there was a single mask that seemed unique, out of place, and thus focused Ford’s attention. It was a rubber version of the wooden masks he had seen earlier, and those diminutive mask faces at the inn. It was a full-head mask, however, and was more detailed in that it even had veins bulging at its temples. As was the case with some of the heads he had seen in the frames at the inn, it had a kind of circle on its forehead like Buddha...but where the circle on those masks looked like a lump or tumor, this one was flattened like the head of a great spike that had been driven into the being’s skull. The face was painted brown like wood, and was wearing either a snarling grimace or a leering grin. It was offbeat, bizarre, and this time Ford didn’t think he could resist. He turned to his watchful companion, who seemed coiled to spring at the first opportunity to be helpful.

“What is that?” he pointed.

“Ohh...Hahoe,” he said.

“Hahoe? Is that his name? Is he a God, a devil...a folk hero?”

“Hero? Oh...hero?” The worker picked a Batman mask off a peg, and held it out to him. “Hero?”

“Ohhh yeah...Batman...yeah, he’s a hero. But that mask there...what is it supposed to be?”

Looking a bit nervous or at a loss, his eager friend turned toward another man at the opposite end of the room and called him over; Ford didn’t know if this was because that man’s English was better, or if he knew more about this particular mask.

The two exchanged some words in Korean, then the new man addressed Ford. “That mask is not for sale. Last one.”

“Not for sale?”

“It cost too much...ah, 120,000 won.”

“Wow...is that a museum piece?” Ford tried to joke. He was attempting to calculate that amount into dollars in his head. Twelve hundred won was roughly a dollar. His math skills were deficient, but 120,000 won certainly did sound excessive to him.

Anyway, he could tell the man was trying to discourage him from buying the mask. Was it because he considerately didn’t want him to have to spend so much money on it, or – as Ford suspected – that he felt Ford didn’t have the proper understanding of, or respect for, the mask’s significance?

“Hero?” the first man offered, pointing to an adult-sized Superman costume in a plastic bag.

“Um, no thanks...I’ll have to think about it some more, what I want to be on Halloween. I’ll come back again – okay?”

His friend smiled and gave something like a little bow. “Okay...come back. Okay.”

Ford left the store, returned to his wandering. He figured on the way back to the inn he should stop in a convenience store to try their ATM for money and to buy some drinks and snacks to get him through the night. He started working his way in the inn’s direction. He wasn’t too nervous about becoming lost, because in that direction loomed a rugged little mountain with a spire-like tower at its summit which was connected to a cable car system. If he had time before he left the country, he wanted to ride that cable car for its obviously impressive view of Seoul.

He found a convenience store, and an ATM inside it, but it wouldn’t give him any won. Well, he’d try another ATM or one of the banks he’d seen today, either later on or tomorrow. Right now he was tired and wanted to get back to the guest house for a nap. It was drawing close to 2 PM, the time he had settled in yesterday for his rest. He actually missed his cute little room for its safe nest of security; it was his own bit of space now in this huge alien city that might as well be on another planet, or at least in some partly-familiar but very warped alternate dimension.

Ford made it back to the inn as easily as he had hoped by using that spire as his compass needle, trudged up the carpeted steps to room 201, let himself in. After dumping a handful of exotic coins on the desk and storing his drinks away in the miniature fridge, he lay back on his bed with head propped up on both pillows, TV remote in hand, his feet feeling blistered and his brain feeling soaked like a sponge, heavy with all it had absorbed.

5: The Figure

After a short while, knowing he was close to sleep, Ford broke off from watching the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants dubbed into Korean to get up and use the bathroom before he fully succumbed. As he finished, his gaze was drawn to the little frosted window, and he slid back its panels, leaned forward to look at the brick building across the way.

Sure enough, she was there. His hard-working factory girl, the suspended spiral cord of her iron swaying with her strokes, her ponytail bobbing, her shirt riding up in back...apparently the same long-sleeved maroon top from yesterday. Ford checked his watch. 3:30 PM. Just the start of her second shift hours, then?

Again, he thought of the hard-working, married Vietnamese woman whom he had developed such a strong crush on at his job. The diligent little Asian girl in the library, years before that. He thought of An, his future “ba xa”, if he could make it into Vietnam successfully...and if they hit it off with each other. What if it turned out she didn’t like him, having met him in the flesh? He was self conscious about being twenty years older than she was, though she had assured him her father was twenty years older than her mother and thus it was not an odd concept to her. She had reassured him that she was not simply using him as a means to come to the United States – there to abandon him once she achieved her citizenship.

Look at how cute that girl was, just a humble factory worker, not even one of those model-lovely stewardesses on Korean Air flights. There were millions of them like her, here and in other Asian countries. Did their men appreciate them, realize how lucky they were? Why shouldn’t he have one of them, too? They were not all untouchable exotic princesses...nor was he the lowliest of men. And yet he still felt oddly undeserving. Oddly pessimistic about obtaining An. Were the two of them merely indulging in a fantasy?

Well, he was this close to her. Just one step further. He must not give in to a defeatist attitude now.

Ford closed the window, padded back to bed on his bare feet, their blisters swelling with every second (“Seoul, sole, soul,” he thought, drowsily), and this time when he stretched out he fell instantly into dreams that he did not remember upon waking, as he almost never did since becoming an adult.

When he awoke, the TV was the only light in the room; a look at his wrist watch told him it was just past 11 PM. Another nice long refreshing sleep. He fished around under his blanket and found the remote, surfed until a movie caught his eye. It was a decade or two old, from the looks of it. When he tuned into the film, it was to see a woman squirming in agony on a hospital bed, her feet in stirrups (but the camera not facing her privates). At first it appeared she was going to give birth, but that didn’t seem to be the case as a group of experts of some kind stared at her crotch dispassionately, doing nothing to relieve her misery.

Ford rose, flicked on a light, and immediately spotted a centipede with long feathery legs poised upon one wall. It was no larger or more exotically horrible than the ones he found in his own apartment back home, but it was an unwelcome roommate nonetheless. He fetched his free travel guide to Korea, snuck up on the thing and squashed it before it could scurry out of reach. He wiped its smear off the book with a tissue and brought that into the bathroom with him. He dropped it into the trash bucket there.

The streetlight beyond made his frosted window glow like ice. Would his girl still be ironing, after all these hours he had slept? Well, this was about the time he’d viewed her last night. Once more, he pushed the sliding panes of the window to one side to let in the mild cool air of night. Once more, he leaned close to the opening to gaze toward the contemporary brick building.

Yes...still there, still ironing. Had she even taken a dinner or coffee break since he’d seen her almost seven hours earlier? No wonder she looked so stressed, unsmiling, a few stray strands of fine black hair hanging in her face. Was nobody there to help or relieve her? He saw no other bodies or parts of bodies entering into the frame of her window.

She never looked his way. Would she, if he put on the bathroom light? He played with the idea of waving across to her, a nice safe distant flirtation...like emailing a girl in Vietnam.

A faint crunching sound attracted his attention. A footstep on sidewalk grit? Ford had to practically stick his head out the window to look down toward the little alley, of which the inn formed one wall, pressing himself against the aluminum frame.

The narrow passage was filled to its brim with gloom, the air conditioners that jutted out barely distinguishable. But Ford believed he saw a figure in the alley, its back turned to him. It was motionless, and its attitude suggested a man relieving his bladder against the wall, though he listened for and heard no streaming sound. Probably some drunk who had ducked into the alley to answer nature’s call. It reminded him that he had to empty his own bladder and he pulled back from the window to do so, leaving it open, knowing that at this angle and in his own sheltering gloom, the girl in the factory would not be able to see him.

Finished, he washed and dried his hands, then returned to the window for a last peek before he closed it and gravitated back to his bed and the odd movie.

At first, what he saw seemed unreal to him, as if it were contained within a TV screen, not a window frame.

There were two figures in the window opposite, not one, and they seemed to be in a sexual embrace. But it was quickly apparent that it was a struggle rather than an amorous coupling. One of the two people was of course the girl in blue jeans and maroon top, the top riding further up her back than ever because of the way she was bent forward over the table she normally ironed at, her arms splayed out across it. The other person was larger, bulkier, a man in black clothing. His face was very dark; Ford’s first impression was that it was a black man. This figure had seized the young woman from behind, his left hand gripping one of her wrists, pressing his front against her back so as to use his weight to pin her against the workbench. Her face was contorted in terror and pain, her eyes squeezed shut and mouth open. Ford realized that her slender throat was in the grip of the man’s other hand, his arm a restraining bar across her chest.

“Oh my God,” Ford whispered. “Oh no...” Surely she couldn’t be alone in the building. Couldn’t any of her coworkers hear her cries? Or was any sound getting past the hand constricting her throat?

The woman tried to twist her shoulders and buck her body to throw him off, jerked her head from side to side, and she reached back awkwardly, desperately, with her free hand in an attempt to claw the attacker’s dark face. At the same time that he snapped his own head back to avoid her flailing claws, the figure used the hand around her throat to tilt her head up against his shoulder so as to limit its thrashing.

As she screwed her head to the right, grimacing with the effort to spread the man’s thumb far enough away to break his hold, Ford saw the woman’s eyes flash open, and he almost flinched. For the first time since he had spied on her, her eyes appeared to look directly across at his window, and to lock with his own. They seemed to stare into each other’s faces in a moment of mirrored, uncomprehending horror.

The figure let go of her left wrist, and though Ford couldn’t be sure, it looked as though he were reaching down to the front of his pants to unzip them, or maybe to the front of hers. Whatever he was doing, the young woman was more aware of it than Ford was, and launched into a greater effort of squirming. She whipped her freed left hand around behind her and scratched blindly at his hidden hand.

The figure raised his head, and he too appeared to look out the window, across the street at the window of the guest house. Directly into Ford’s eyes, and the American saw the attacker’s face clearly for the first time.

It was dark brown because it was meant to look like wood. A terrible wide grimace or grin was molded onto the visage. Though from here it was too distant to make out, Ford knew it had a circle on its forehead like a bolt driven into its skull, and veins standing out on its temples as if real blood circulated through its rubber flesh.

Then, the face looked down quickly at the girl. Maybe she had successfully raked him, and the pain had reclaimed his attention. It also seemed to replace his ardor with fury, as if he had countenanced a great rejection more hurtful than the scratches. The figure dragged the girl back from the workbench, twisted her to one side and shoved her down to her knees or at least out of Ford’s view, below the level of the window. He let go of the woman’s throat with his right hand; Ford could imagine her sucking in a loud, wheezing gasp of air. But the man had only let go of her neck so that he could reach over to the iron Ford had watched the woman use in the course of her work.

Still holding her down out of sight with his left hand, maybe crushing her shoulder in his hand or with his fingers knotted in her hair, the figure raised the iron up past his shoulder, the pointed end facing down. Then he brought the iron downward with force. Raised it again, higher this time, and brought it down even more viciously. A third arcing blow. The figure straightened up, his arms at his sides, having released the girl but still holding onto the iron. Then, the figure with his brown rubber head slowly sank out of view also.

The iron’s spiral, telephone-like cord swayed and bounced. Was that a wisp of steam rising up, like a departing spirit? The iron had still been in the figure’s hand...

“Jesus Christ,” Ford hissed, “Oh Jesus.” He was quivering violently, as if he were strapped helpless in an electric chair and a powerful current ran into him. He wanted to yell out his window at the attacker, in outrage, to bellow an alarm to the neighborhood, but found himself as choked as the girl had been. He dashed out of the dark bathroom, into the main room, with the thought of calling the police. But he didn’t know their number, or how to get an outside call. He must go downstairs, then – wake the owner of the inn, who lived on the premises...

But he hesitated, his hand still hovering near the phone, thoughts scampering in every direction like insects exposed from their hiding place under a rock. It was too late by this point, wasn’t it? Surely the blows from the iron had killed the poor girl, and now if she were being violated it must be postmortem?

If he awoke the inn keeper, and he in turn called the police, they would want to question Ford. After his experience with the stern Vietnamese immigration agents and security for Korean Air, he dreaded facing a group of uniformed Korean policemen. They would want to detain him, especially if he had to act as a witness in a trial (assuming they even arrived in time to apprehend the masked attacker). But he had to pick up his visa on October 7th, if it were truly ready as promised, and purchase a ticket to return to Vietnam on the eighth. He could not afford to be delayed. An was waiting for him; he’d already lost days he could have spent with her – in her arms.

Ford withdrew his hand from the phone. After almost a minute, in which he numbly watched the movie still playing on his TV, he crept back into the bathroom. Timidly, afraid of what he might see – or what might see him – he peeked out at that window with newspaper screening the top of it. Maybe in those newspapers’ articles was a story about some crazed rapist-murderer. Some serial killer who had been stalking Seoul’s streets. Maybe the police already knew about this man...

The room beyond the window appeared empty. The iron’s cord hung unmoving like a vine. Was the killer still upon the girl, down out of sight, or had he already left the building?

Remembering the figure he had seen lurking in the alley below, Ford twisted uncomfortably to look down along the guest house’s flank, but he saw no one. If that had been the killer before, then he hadn’t returned to hide in the alley.

Maybe when he had spotted the figure in the alley before, the figure had also seen him. Why else would the masked visage have turned and stared in his direction during the attack, so boldly, as if to taunt him? So arrogant and daring, that the killer hadn’t fled even when he’d seen Ford witnessing his deeds. As if he already knew Ford would do nothing to thwart him.

He didn’t see me, Ford rebutted himself. Couldn’t have. His window had been dark. The girl couldn’t have seen him, either. Or had there been just enough dim glow behind him, from the other room, to vaguely silhouette his head in the window? He prayed this hadn’t been the case. Not so much because he was afraid the attacker would seek him out...but because of the idea that the girl had seen him observing her attack, mute and immobile – her last impression of a human being, other than the one assaulting her.

Ford drifted back into the main room. His electrified shivering had diminished to a barely perceptible hum. Just enough current to animate a zombie. Stunned, his brain blanked, he gaped into the flickering blue cathode rays.

He didn’t watch the movie straight through – he kept gliding weightless as a ghost into the bathroom to look out at the brick building, but he still saw no one in the factory room; if the girl had been discovered by a coworker, and if the police had arrived, then no one ever entered into his range of vision. From what he did see of the movie, he realized it was supposed to be a comedy, but he found it loathsome, appalling. This disgusting, disheveled guy was going around like a crazed satyr drunk with lust, losing control and jumping women, raping them (without the action becoming more than R-rated), his activities being monitored by a group of researchers or such led by a smirking beauty. This group even lured some hookers as victims for him. Each victim would be taken to a hospital and observed in their writhing pain by these researchers. Ford gathered that the slobbering sex maniac’s penis was so large it had injured his victims internally. A real laugh riot, this flick.

Finally, after the movie had ended and Ford had changed channels, he checked on the factory window and saw that it had gone dark. He peeped out at it numerous times after that, barely sitting as the hours dragged by, but the factory room was not lit again. He heard no screams of discovery, no sirens, saw no police vehicles or officers in the street below, even as the sky slowly lightened.

Maybe if he had acted, he thought – still restlessly pacing with TV remote in hand, his body manufacturing an endless supply of adrenalin – the attacker might have been caught. He assumed the man hadn’t been. Now, if another woman or a number of women were murdered, he would be partly to blame, right?

No...no...he reasoned that the attacker wouldn’t have lingered long enough to become captured. If he was crafty enough to enter the factory and sneak up on the girl, he was crafty enough to escape. He might even be a worker in the plant, and after hiding or disposing of the mask he would have blended back into seeming innocence.

Finally, finishing off the last of the drinks he had taken from his mini-fridge during the night, but craving a coffee, he decided to shower and change his clothing before heading downstairs. He needed to try to get more money from an ATM today, in case he couldn’t use his debit card to pay for his new plane tickets, and because he knew he was going to run over the budget he had tried to enforce upon himself so as to have funds remaining in his bank account when he returned home.

But he must still try to find out, in a way that didn’t attract attention to himself, what he had seen last night. He might broach a conversation with the inn keeper, who spoke fair English, or see if he could find a local English-language newspaper, if such existed. Maybe, he fantasized, it had only been a play put on for his entertainment, something arranged by the guest house for tourists, a bit of Horrorwood come to him.

6: Bedlam and Breakfast

The very moment it turned 6 AM, Ford descended to the kitchen, there firing up one of the computers. Though he had been invited to make himself toast in the mornings, he was relieved that there was no one to watch him as he hastily built a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. While doing so, he noticed a swarm of tiny brownish-translucent insects scurrying in all directions across the black formica of the table, and didn’t know if they were roaches or ants; he swept them away with a paper towel too quickly to observe them. Had they emerged from the opened bread bag, or had they already been there? He decided to be brave and eat the sandwich anyway, brought it and a black coffee to the computer. He wanted to check his bank’s available balance online, but the first thing he did was begin looking for an online Korean news source in English...though surely it was too soon for the attack to have been written up, only hours after the crime had occurred?

And what if the body still hadn’t been discovered? What if that young woman had been the last one in the building, charged with closing up for the night? What if she still lay there on the floor even now, nude or partially disrobed, her eyelids – with their exotic “epicanthic fold” – half-closed over eyes dark as chocolates, blood matted in thick crusts and clots in her blue-black hair, her body cool but terrible triangular marks imprinted hotly into her soft golden flesh...here...and here...and here?

Ford shook off the mental picture with a shudder, concentrated on the screen...though it wasn’t so much the image that stabbed at him, but the recurring guilt that he had not put his hand on that phone...

He typed in some phrases as keywords – “English language Korean news” and things of that nature. He found a number of satisfactory results, such as at the web site JooAng Daily. Here, he typed “crime reports” into the search feature, but found nothing dated from the previous night. The closest he came to a related story was that a man named Yoo Yeong-cheol had been arrested back in July and was said to have murdered 26 people, 11 of them female masseuses. He had been planning to murder another masseuse when apprehended.

Before he gave up the idea of learning anything online about what he’d witnessed, Ford read that between September of 1986 and April of 1991, someone had raped and murdered 10 women in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi province. That killer had never been identified. Hmm...but how likely was it that this killer would still be free on the streets after 13 years, instead of dead or captured for some rape or murder the police had not linked to the other 10 victims?

Despite the city seeming so safe to him, it had known its predators and monsters over the years, after all. But Ford supposed that violence inspired by issues of distorted self-esteem, disjointed sexuality, and insanity were both universal and timeless.

He was oddly relieved to be able to call up his bank account, as if he’d been afraid that such a prosaic sight would not be accessible in this strange place. The day before leaving for his vacation he had deposited a large check (he was paid biweekly) and he wanted to make sure the money had cleared, and to see how much it may have been reduced by several automatic deductions. He was satisfied with the amount available to him – it would cover the replacement plane tickets he required.

Why the mask? he asked himself, with his bank account information still projecting a pale light on his face. Why that mask, that he had just happened to see earlier in the day, only a matter of hours before? Was it so common, then? It couldn’t possibly be the very same one...

He blinked, distractedly decided he should check to see if An had left him a new message, but then a young man who worked at the inn and whom he had seen before came into the kitchen area and Ford smiled up at him. Either the man was suffering conjunctivitis, or someone had punched him – one of his eyes was pink and swollen into a drooping slit that made Ford’s own eyes want to water in sympathy. Ford decided it had been a punch; again, so much for Seoul being free of crime and violence.

“Is there someplace you want me to take you today?” the man offered, having poured himself a coffee. He was pretty adept with English. “I’ll be taking some other people in the van...”

“Ah, no thanks...I think I’m just going to walk around again today.” As the man nodded and started to head around the corner to attend the front desk, Ford said, “Um, but tomorrow my new visa is supposed to be ready for me; the Vietnam Embassy is preparing it. Could you take me there tomorrow?”

“Okay. Yes. Do you remember the name of the street it’s on?”

“Mm, no, I don’t.”

“Ahh, that’s okay – I’ll look on the computer.” And the man went up front with his coffee, presumably to find the information on the embassy right there and then.

A message from An did indeed await him. Once more, he reassured her of his determination to reach her. As if to give himself fresh inspiration in his efforts, he called to mind the first photo of her he had seen, posted at the online, Asian-oriented dating service. It had been professionally taken, looked like a wannabe actress’s glamour shot. She had been crouching close to the ground, as if to squeeze her entire body into the frame, wearing tight blue jeans embroidered with flowers and a skimpy top that bared her back, the black hair sliding down that back looking silken to the touch, staring sulkily into the camera as if in imitation of a pouting model. He had been a little intimidated by the picture at first. Was she too young, too sexy to be interested in an older American man like himself? And if she claimed to be, could he really trust her to be sincere? Still, her solemn, mask-like face in that photo had seized him...had ever since floated before his eyes to lure him onward...

Having sent his return message on its way (at least his words could enter her country freely), he decided to get up, stretch, and see if the man at the desk was in fact checking into the embassy’s location at this moment. Just on the other side of the kitchen wall was the doorway into the tiny reception office; Ford hung back in the threshold as he watched the man with the swollen eye tap at his own computer. The writing on screen was all in Korean.

“Have you found it?” he asked.

“Mm, yes,” the man muttered, and he scribbled some words onto a scrap of paper for his own reference. He turned in his chair. “So I can bring you there tomorrow.”

“Thanks so much. I just pray the thing is really ready then.”

“I have their number; we can call them first, before we go.”

“Yeah, good idea...thanks again.”

With something like a jolt of recognition, Ford saw two faces peering at him through the open reception desk area that the man sat in. From this spot Ford could see into the modest space that passed for a lobby, and in a recess in the wall were framed two brown masks of the type in the other two frames downstairs, except that this pair was full-sized. He asked himself why he had jumped; he hadn’t thought it was the man from last night, peeking through the opening at him, this time with a woman beside him – had he? One mask looked male, and rather like the rubber mask he had seen in the store. The other mask was of a woman with a circle of red on either cheek, and one on her forehead like an Indian bindi, or a bloody bullet wound.

Irrationally, Ford found himself asking, “Was that here before?”

A little puzzled, the man with the swollen eye looked through the counter’s opening at the masks, then up at Ford. “The masks?”

Of course they had been there before; he just hadn’t had cause to notice them. Before, they had merely been another exotic detail his eyes had skated across. They had not held any significance to him until last night...

Ford’s gaze shifted to the man at the desk. He wondered if one of those masks might fit on this man’s face. Could the mask he had seen on the figure last night have been wooden, not rubber after all? And wasn’t it just possible that when the attacker had lowered out of view with the iron in his hand, his victim – still alive – might have torn the mask off his face? Struck him in one of his eyes?

“Sir?”

Ford smiled tightly. “Nothing. Oh...ah, last night I thought I heard someone scream outside.” He watched the man’s face closely. “Did someone get hurt, do you know?”

The man did indeed look fidgety all of a sudden; evasive. But he responded, “Well, yes sir, a woman was murdered across the street last night...”

The words turned to full volume a white noise in Ford’s head. Somehow, he had not expected to hear confirmation of what he had witnessed, despite his work to locate some reference on the web. Somehow he had expected, or hoped, that it had only been a dream that he had experienced while he merely thought he was awake. But now...

The man went on, “...but you shouldn’t worry. Seoul is a very safe city – none of our guests have ever been robbed or attacked. It may have been the woman’s lover, or someone she knew...”

“How was she...killed?”

“They say she was beaten. And...burned...with a...” At a loss for the correct word, the man made a forward and back motion with his fist above the desk top. Ironing.

“God,” Ford whispered. It had been real. Why hadn’t he picked up that phone receiver...why?

“You mustn’t be concerned, sir.” The man looked worried that Ford might go upstairs, fetch his belongings, and check out right then.

Ford’s suspicions about the man wilted, to hear him relate this news. His tone didn’t hint at hidden boasting. Somehow, the figure Ford had watched didn’t seem like it could be some simple inn worker, some everyday person – though of course, serial killers were invariably just that, outwardly. Ford had the strange thought that what he had seen had not been a man wearing a mask, but some kind of demon or apparition made corporeal. The mask not really a mask, at all – but the figure’s own flesh.

7: Asset 69

Ford let his conversation with the inn worker dribble away, and turned toward the hallway opposite the kitchen area. He glided almost without willing it to the larger of the two displays of miniature masks mounted on the downstairs walls.

The faces were not frightening, in themselves (though if these diminutive faces, with monkey-small bodies to match, had been ringing his bed in the night he would find them terrifying enough). On the square-shaped plaque, eight masks formed a circle around a central, important-looking character with a tall hat. A label printed on the background, in both Korean and English writing, identified him as “Yangban Tal”. At the top, a woman named “Gaksi Tal”. Clockwise, the next was a man, “Choraengi Tal”. Another man, “Seonbi Tal”, followed by another, younger woman. Ford recognized her as the same woman represented in the display of two life-sized masks hanging near the front office. She was “Bune Tal”. Following her, at the bottom, was the only half-mask, missing a bottom jaw: “Imae Tal”. Finally, ascending, three male masks: “Paekjong Tal”, “Halmi Tal”, “Jung Tal”. The word Tal, Ford decided, must mean mask.

He shifted to the long, vertical display of even smaller masks on the kitchen partition, and saw there were nine of them as well, the same characters but with their English names spelled a bit differently here and there. After studying them a minute or so, he returned to the larger frame.

Both the older and young women had those red dots painted on cheeks and forehead...but more importantly to Ford, two of the male characters seemed to have a knobby growth on their foreheads, reminding him of the rubber mask he had seen in the store. These characters were “Paekjong” and “Jung”. He tried to conjure that rubber mask in his mind, to compare it to these two faces, but because of the basic resemblance the masks all shared with each other he couldn’t be sure which of the two it might have been.

In the upper right corner of the background were the words, “Korean Traditional Mask” (in the singular). In the upper left: “The Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism”. The exhibit was furthered described as, “Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 69”.

“Hahoe”...that was surely what the man in the store had said, when Ford had expressed interest in the rubber mask.

“Exorcism,” he muttered to himself. Then, the idea to look into the history of the masks on the internet rose in his mind, and he stepped up into the kitchen to seat himself before one of the twin computers again.

Ford found plenty of references to “Korean Mask Dance Drama”, and even a little legend behind the making of these masks. The legend was that a man named Huh (“Huh?” Ford thought) had rigidly isolated himself and begun making masks after a deity appeared to him in a dream. A young woman who loved this Bachelor Huh spied upon him in his pious isolation, and this triggered a terrible curse, causing Huh to spit up blood and perish. As a result, he was unable to complete his final mask, that of “Imae”, and that was why this mask possessed no lower jaw. Pandora, Eve, this girl – in their curiosity, the women of myth always seemed to unleash misery upon the world of hapless men.

One site offered a background on the mask play. It had been performed at periods of “bad luck” or during certain festivals every ten years, and was intended as a shamanistic rite to banish evil spirits. Hence the “exorcism”. From their grotesque aspect, he had thought some of the masks themselves might have depicted demons to be exorcized, but as he read on that didn’t appear to be the case.

Ford learned that when not in use, these sacred masks were carefully stored away, and prior to their removal an actor would offer a sacrifice before the chest containing them. If one treated a mask disrespectfully, he would be struck by an arrow (fired by whom or what, Ford couldn’t determine). No wonder the man at the gift shop had appeared reluctant to sell him even a rubber version, he thought.

The masks’ lower jaws could be moved by the actors to change the expression from mirthful to angry. Because of their spiritual power, a mask was believed to laugh after the actor laughed...and to become angry after the actor wearing it portrayed anger.

Ford located a site that gave a detailed summary of this play. The set-up concerned a young bride who unexpectedly died before her wedding. A wedding ceremony still had to be performed so that her restless spirit might be appeased. This story reminded Ford of something he had read about the crash of a Korean Air jet in 1997 in which 228 people were killed. Shamans had been summoned to marry off the spirits of some of those victims who had been unmarried at the time of their death.

In Act 3 of the play, the butcher Paekjong dances onto the stage and is soon joined by an ox, who dances with him. But then the butcher slays the ox and repeatedly hacks at it, cutting off its testicles and tearing out its organs. He holds aloft the heart and then the liver in order to attract a buyer. About the liver, he says, “Surely you know what this is good for? For a man, what is more important than strength? Even Confucius married and had children.”

The butcher staggers offstage, maddened by the crash of thunder, growing increasingly insane with guilt.

Paekjong’s mask was described as conveying a sinister, murderous expression when the actor tilted his head forward. But when he tipped it back, the mask took on a deranged grin meant to express the butcher’s remorse for the animals he slaughters.

Ford studied the leering dark face of Paekjong closely. It was one of the two he thought best matched the rubber mask he had seen in the gift shop. A butcher. But then he looked into the character of the other suspicious mask. Jung – ha. No relation to Carl, he thought. He had a book edited by Carl Jung at home, titled Man and His Symbols. He recalled it mentioned the ritual use of masks here and there, along with addressing Jung’s classic subject matter such as the collective unconscious, synchronicity, the female anima and male animus...

He found the character named Jung in Act 5.

The female character Bune enters the stage, her face heavily powdered and made up like a bride’s. She squats to urinate, and is spied by Jung, a wandering monk. The monk is so aroused by this that he gathers the soil she urinated on and sniffs it. To Bune he says, “Hello, pretty maid. I may be a monk, but I'm also a man. Come dance with me.” He then rapes her...and ultimately takes her onto his back and runs off with her.

Ford was reminded of that appalling movie playing on his TV while the factory girl was being attacked, its horrible rapist of a hero. Yes, he thought, studying the grinning, crescent-eyed mask of the depraved monk, that lump bulging from his forehead like a brain tumor pressing outward, a diseased fruit, ready to burst. Maybe it had been this one.

Ford knew what he had to do today. He set two tasks for himself. Find an ATM to get more money...and find that little store with the Halloween masks again. He had to see if that rubber mask he had admired was missing. He had to know if – in some kind of serendipity, or synchronicity –  the mask he had seen in that shop was the same one worn by the man who seemed to be playing the roles of Paekjong and Jung at once. Because Ford was still undecided about which of those two characters the rubber mask had represented. It might have been a synthesis of both...two characters in one skin.

8: The Citizens

While wandering about Seoul in an effort to fulfill his second task, Ford experienced mounting frustration in fulfilling the first.

ATMs in a convenience store and outside a bank gave him nothing but indecipherable slips of paper. (He was relieved, at least, that they spit his card out again.) He remembered that the tourist book he’d been given suggested subway ATMs, and he descended below the street in search of some, found a few, received only more cryptic receipts for his growing collection. While in the subway he tried to calm himself with a little diversion, browsed briefly in a comic book store. The graphic novels he looked through were violent, disturbing, and he supposed they were Korean though they looked Japanese to him. Again, without knowing much about this country’s history he sensed the Japanese had influenced the Koreans heavily, but their presence in Korea couldn’t have been entirely agreeable: one thing he recalled hearing about was the Korean “comfort women” the Japanese had pressed into sexual slavery.

In entering and then leaving the subway, he became a little exasperated to note that – while the cars here drove on the right side of the road as in the US – people climbed up the left side of a flight of steps and descended on the right. This seemed backwards to him and he nearly collided with others a few times, though he might have been a rock in a stream for all the attention he received as they flowed around him. Another thing began to nibble at his patience. People walked slowly here. Couldn’t they sense him behind them, wanting them to speed up or let him around? Once he actually let out a loud sigh and the man in front of him glanced over his shoulder. He wanted to bark at a few of these people, “Come on, I’ve got things to do, I’m an American!”

He went into a branch of Citibank, hoping the familiar American name would bode well for him, but a pretty young woman could only smile and apologize with that familiar, sweet but professional politeness that he found increasingly cloying. When he asked her if there were a Bank of America about, as they owned the chain of banks he belonged to back home, she sketched him directions. Initially hopeful, in following the directions he became hopelessly lost.

Either they were fawningly polite or they rudely ignored him in the street, although he knew his presence was conspicuous, to say the least. “Look at me!” he wanted to snap in this or that icily closed face, to draw the gaze of those downcast or averted eyes. He had never felt so much like a ghost in his life; unseen, unrecognized. Occasionally flocks of schoolgirls, appearing Japanese in their short tartan skirts and jackets, drifted by and he eyed them with a weak, irritable lust. The otherness that had intrigued him so recently now chafed him. The city was just familiar enough to taunt him, just alien enough to disorient him. Dis-Orient, he thought. Ha.

Hours were passing. His feet weren’t breaking in his new shoes – his new shoes were breaking his feet. They clumped along, big and black and noisy like Frankenstein’s boots. Like a soldier’s. He didn’t care any more how he came across to them – warmongering American, Ugly American, uncouth vulgar self-important American. Whatever you say.

What was the fucking problem? The book said the ATMs here were global...they said he should be able to get his money out of them, damn it. He was punching up the English directions on them. But the scraps of paper they thrust out like mocking tongues were not in his language.

In his search for both a responsive ATM and – presently, just an afterthought – the elusive gift shop, he came across two pitiable beggars. The first was in a motorized wheelchair, paraplegic, and a tape player somewhere (in the back of his chair?) was oozing maudlin music as a kind of soundtrack for him. Ford gathered all the change he had in his pocket and dropped it into a slot in the wooden box affixed to the front of the wheelchair. If the ATMs wouldn’t give him money, then he might as well feed money into what looked like the shoddiest ATM in Korea. As he lifted his eyes, a man on the street nodded to him, obviously with appreciation, but whether this man was accompanying the cripple or simply a pedestrian impressed with Ford’s brusque gesture of compassion, he didn’t know. In either case, the nod did soothe his irritation a little bit.

The second beggar, later on, was much more grotesque. He, too, played tear-wringing music on a tape player resting on the pavement, but rather than sitting twisted in a wheelchair, this man lay on his belly on a board fitted with wheels, dragging himself along. Weirdly, his pants looked to Ford like they were made of black rubber, and they looked like they didn’t have legs inside them. Ford didn’t see a pot or bucket to drop money in as he strode by, but he saw plenty of other pedestrians ignoring the man as they passed him, so he felt a little less guilty.

When not seething, feeling thwarted at every turn, Ford waxed philosophical. Here he was focusing so intently on a prosaic matter like getting some cash out of a machine, and almost forgetting entirely that he had seen a human being murdered. At first, he had believed he was facing all these trials and challenges bravely, thinking fast on his feet, since having been evicted from Vietnam. But now he wondered if he was not so much resilient as merely somnambulant, trudging numbly and fatalistically along through his situation like a sleepwalker.

What was the correct reaction, the appropriate behavior – sit down and pray for the girl’s soul, so as to pay proper respect to the enormity of this loss?

He knew what he could do. What he should do. Call the police.

An anonymous call from a pay phone, at least? But what if they could find out how many English-speaking tourists were in Seoul (he argued with himself weakly) and track down their whereabouts? As he marched on robotically, he decided that once in Vietnam he would do a web search to find the proper email address, and then send a detailed message about what he’d seen to the Seoul police department. Surely they wouldn’t extradite him as a witness! Or, because he would need to pass through Korea again on his return trip home, maybe he’d just wait until he was back in the States. That would be soon enough, right?

At another tourist center, he asked a woman with a plaque labeled ENGLISH in front of her about Bank of America again, and was given a real map with the area circled in ballpoint. Still, he soon found himself befuddled when back on the pavement. With each misplaced step, the pain in his blistered feet increased.

He entered a street gouged open its length like a chasm, apparently a subway line being repaired or laid in. The shops facing this street were dusty, shabby. He paused to gaze into the window of one of them. It took him a while to understand what he was seeing, preserved in liquid inside several very large glass containers and a row of relatively smaller bottles, like the deformed babies – or “pickled punks” – in carnivals he remembered from his boyhood. Some of these masses flowered into uncountable threads, looking like a human nervous system branching out from a central spine – extracted in one piece, every nerve ending intact, and stuffed into a bottle of formaldehyde. Other masses looked vaguely anthropomorphic, like unformed homunculi, waiting to be removed and grown into full-sized, human-like golems. Mandrake roots? No...ginseng roots, he realized.

To his relief, the building housing Bank of America was just around the next corner, but the tourist center had told him it was located on the 9th floor and this made him leery as he walked toward the looming structure. In the elevator up, he stared at his own reflection in the mirrored walls, crosshatched into many diced pieces. A security guard at a desk let him past, and just inside the office he met with another lovely young woman with more smiles of apology. He sensed a slight degree of amused bewilderment from her and a male colleague as she explained that this bank only served businesses, not individuals. Hearing his plight, she suggested a bank down the street, but her tone sounded dubious about his chances of success.

Ford rode down to the street again, feeling bitter and defeated. That was it, then, wasn’t it? He would not have enough money to buy new tickets to and from Vietnam, or to properly vacation there, paying for the hotel room An was booking for him, gifts for her, meals for her, taking her whole family out for dinner as he’d planned. Should he use what money he had left to remain in Seoul, in the guest house, until it was time for his flight from Korea to Chicago to Boston...or should he try to exchange that flight for an earlier flight, and just go home now? Either way, he would have to abandon his goal, his dreams.

He sketched the beginnings of an email to An in his mind; words like, “I’m so sorry, em...” and, “I tried...”Anyway, was it for the best? Would An have turned out to be so different in every way, in matters large and small, that her initial exotic appeal would warp into frustration, exasperation? Was his experience with this country a portent of that? She and he as lost with each other as he and all these pretty bank workers? His one-time future ba xa an embodiment of all Asian people, another race from his, with whom he could only exchange politely mystified smiles?

9: Horror...wood

When Ford realized where the bank was that the woman had suggested to him, he wanted to laugh. It was on the other side of that dug-up abyss of a street. Of course it was! Where else would it be, except maybe on the moon? Should he even bother trying? The day had declined toward late afternoon. It might be closing time, soon. But, zombie-like, he walked down the street far enough that he could go around the immense trench, cross and double back toward the bank.

He took a number, waited to be seen, at a service desk changed the last of his money into won. Whatever he had left prior to leaving the country he’d trade for dollars again at the airport. Before he made this exchange, however, he had counted what he had remaining and was dismayed to find himself $100 shorter than he had thought. How had that happened? He supposed he hadn’t been calculating the exchange rate accurately, or hadn’t been keeping a close enough eye on his expenses (he knew it hadn’t been stolen anywhere; he’d been careful to wear a money belt, advised to do so in travel guides to Vietnam). He felt more dismal than ever. As he was given his won, he asked the person at the desk if he could use his debit card to withdraw money from his US account. This seemed to cause some nervous concern or confusion, and a handsome young security guard was beckoned over to talk with the man at the desk. The guard indicated for Ford to come with him to a row of ATM machines. Ford wanted to explain that he had tried half the ATMs in Seoul, with no luck. The man disappeared into a room behind the machines, then shortly came back. Ford had the odd notion that the guard with his little holstered toy-like pistol, as cute as he was, had done something to unlock or bypass one of the ATMs in some way. He inserted Ford’s card, touched the keys the screen prompted him to...and Ford heard a familiar, whirring sound that made his chest lock up in anticipation. A moment later, the machine began spitting out money. Ford wanted to grab the cute guard and kiss him.

As soon as he left the building, it looked like the guard locked the door behind him. Was it closing time, or did they just want him out? He was too happy to be paranoid. He would celebrate, find himself a nice restaurant to have dinner in. His step was lighter (however agonized his feet had become). In keeping his eyes open for a place to eat, he saw signs advertising a DVD store. Why not? He could finally enjoy himself a little before he made it back to the inn. He went inside, found he had to climb a flight of stairs to reach the store, but knew he was in the right place from the wall of the landing above, covered in a montage of Korean movie posters (or Korean versions of posters for American movies). The shop itself was tiny, a single tall shelf stuffed with DVDs facing a counter at which stood a very attractive woman with her brownish-dyed hair tied back in a long ponytail, who gave him the obligatory courteous smiles but who seemed a little uneasy to find such an unexpected customer in her shop. Ford wondered if he could presently be the only Caucasian man in all of Seoul (with its ten million citizens, according to his guide). He jokingly thought that maybe he himself should have bought one of those wooden, full-sized masks that he’d seen for sale in the street the other day, and worn it to give himself narrower eyes, darker skin, in an effort to better blend in with the masses.

He found a DVD of a horror movie he had heard about, starring a Taiwanese actress he’d seen in an English-language action film – so gorgeous that he had yearned for her almost painfully while watching that film. Later, on the web, he had found and printed out numerous sensuous and even nude pictures of her. At the moment, however, he couldn’t recall her name. To make conversation, feeling as uncomfortable as the proprietress, he pointed to the box and asked her the actress’s name. “Oh...Hsu Chi?” the woman said.

“Yes...yes...that’s her,” Ford said. “I like her.” He then asked her if this DVD would be compatible with an American player. The woman didn’t speak English, as it turned out, made some kind of apology in Korean. Ford replaced the movie, told her maybe he’d come back, and descended to the street. In just these few minutes, evening had begun to encroach.

He ate in a branch of the American chain TGIF – Thank God It’s Friday – and smiled when he saw that the uniforms (multiple cute and funny buttons pinned on them) and decor (lots of American flea market-style junk all over the walls) were identical to what he was familiar with. It was someone’s birthday, and a number of the wait staff even assembled at the table to sing some kind of birthday song as they did in the States, though this one was in Korean and they played a guitar and tambourine. It felt good to be sitting down – his lumpy backpack off his shoulders and resting on the floor – and indulging himself with first one and then a second frozen mudslide. But Ford soon found himself a bit perturbed once more. He had been seated in a far corner, away from everyone else, and it almost seemed intentional, almost made him think it was because he wasn’t Korean. And though his waitress was naturally super-pleasant, the service was terrible. When he had finished, he seemed to wait an eternity for his check. Finally, his good mood lost, almost fuming, he got up and went to the front desk. His bill was produced and he paid, indignantly not returning to the table to leave a tip, not knowing or caring at that moment if tipping was expected.

And so he began threading his way back in the direction he hoped the guest house lay. While he had been dining, night had truly fallen.

He had almost forgotten to look, had given up on finding it...but in heading back, outside a shop he saw rows of plastic jack-o’-lanterns ranked along a shelf. Flaccid rubber masks, pitchforks and swords flowering from a bucket. Ford fairly broke into a trot to reach the gift shop, and plunged inside. The man who had followed him upstairs the first time opened his mouth as if to begin a greeting, but Ford passed right by him and danced up the steps to the second floor.

There, he stood staring blankly at the empty spot where he knew the mask play visage had been hanging. The young man caught up with him, hovered at his shoulder. Ford turned to him, pointing at the gap in the rows of masks. “Someone bought it?”

The man grinned awkwardly, looking at a loss.

“It’s gone. Who bought it? The Hahoe mask.”

“Hero?” The man looked like he would reach for a Spider-Man mask.

“No, no, forget it. Thanks anyway.”

“Trick-or-treat?” The man swept his hand through the air between them. “Trick-or-treat?”

“Huh?” The motion caused Ford to look down at himself. He was wearing a black t-shirt, black denim jeans, those new black shoes. Was that what the man meant...that he was wearing all black? Was he asking if he were dressed to go trick-or-treating? It hadn’t been an intentional act to dress all in black today – it was simply his favorite color for clothing. “No...no trick-or-treat,” he replied. He smiled at the man, nodding, moving back to the steps quickly to avoid another round of sales pitches. “Thank you,” he said as he departed, leaving the poor helpful worker more perplexed than ever, he was sure.

So the mask was gone; but that still didn’t mean it was the same one he had seen on the figure. Certainly, there was more than one of that mask in Seoul...

He resumed his achy tramping toward “home”, and considering how lost he had become during the day he found it surprisingly much easier to reach familiar streets than he had expected. When that spire on the high hill near the inn came into view, the needle of a giant compass, he knew he was okay. He moved from the great city canyons into the older, smaller side streets, colorful with lights and bustling with people.

While he was walking, he half saw or heard something light fall to the pavement in front of him, almost striking his shoe. He stopped short and looked down. A toothpick? A toothpick...thrown at him from above. He turned around and looked up at a balcony behind him. Like many balconies he had seen here, it was filled with large potted plants. Had the toothpick been tossed from a window, or from up there, and had it merely been flicked into the street or purposefully thrown at him – in the first overtly hostile or contemptuous act he had experienced?

He thought, then, that he could dimly make out a face, peeking down at him between some of the fronds of those plants. The face appeared to be contorted into a huge, toothless grin, and to be unnaturally dark in color. Ford’s breath froze into a chunk of ice, blocking his throat. But then the face was gone. Either it had withdrawn into the shadows, or he had been mistaken about seeing it at all.

He briskly started away, but glanced back nervously at the toothpick. Maybe not a toothpick? Maybe a splinter of wood...from a wooden mask.

10: Souvenirs

When Ford had mounted the guest house’s stairs and arrived at room 201, he found that he didn’t have his key with him. He had thought he’d put it in his right front pocket; could it be locked inside his room? He returned downstairs and talked to the man on duty, the one with the swollen eye. The man immediately produced the missing key, attached to its green plastic tag, and passed it to him. “You left it on the desk, sir, when you went out this morning.”

“I did?” Ford scrunched his face in confusion. He certainly didn’t remember doing that. An unconscious act, no doubt...unless he had dropped it and someone else had left it there.

“So, tomorrow we call the embassy, and I will drive you there if your visa is ready.”

“Yes...yes...great.” Ford was about to turn back to the stairs, but he could see that the man had been reading something on his computer – the news? – and this made him recall their earlier conversation. “Have there been any developments on, ah...about the girl...murdered over here?” He jerked his head in the direction of the factory.

“No, sir.”

Ford grunted, had begun moving away from the desk when the young man went on, “Well...there was another murder, not too far from here.” Ford halted, and seeing that the American wanted to hear, the desk man continued, “Nothing to be concerned about, sir. It was a cleaning woman, in a department store called Migliore.”

Ford nodded slowly. Instead of saying he’d been there, he droned numbly, “I’ve seen it. That’s where that...HORRORWOOD thing is, right?”

“Yes, sir. The woman was killed on that floor, where HORRORWOOD is, before it opened for the day.”

Ford realized he was still nodding like an automaton, taking in this information. “How?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“How was she killed?”

The desk man winced. “Terrible, sir...too terrible...”

“Tell me.”

The man gestured around the outline of his own face. “She had her...entire face removed, sir. Cut off from her skull. Very horrible.”

Ford discovered that both his hands had gripped the edge of the desk, the key’s plastic tag digging into his palm. With an internalized flinch, he became conscious of the two full-sized wooden masks framed to his left, and gave them a look. He knew them better now, from reading about the play – Yanban and Bune, Bune being the woman raped by the depraved monk Jung. In a weak voice, staring at Bune, Ford asked, “Did they find it? The face?”

“No, sir. But please...this is a very safe city. There is very little crime in Seoul. You must not be afraid.”

“I’ll be leaving soon, anyway,” he muttered, more to himself than the other man, laying out his plans. “Tomorrow – if they say my visa can be picked up – I’ll check out. Then I’ll take a cab to Gimpo Airport. Then a shuttle to Incheon Airport. At the airport, I’ll buy new tickets for a flight to...” He broke off. He didn’t want to reveal the name of the city where he’d be landing. “Anyway, then I’ll just wait there at Incheon until it’s time for my flight.”

“I see, sir. Very good.”

Ford drifted away from the desk, tried not to look at the two framed displays of miniature masks as he went to the staircase leading up to his room. Once inside it, he locked the door, slung his backpack off his shoulders, and pounced on his suitcase – flipping it onto the bed and unzipping it...

Earlier, he had found himself unaccountably $100 short. $100 would work out to be roughly 120,000 won, wouldn’t it? He had been quoted that price at the gift shop on his first visit. And so – how many times had he actually visited that shop, after all?

He clawed through the clothing and whatever else remained unpacked inside his suitcase. Not satisfied, he removed each item and placed them on the mattress until he was certain there was nothing out of the ordinary inside.

No rubber mask.

Why should there be? He couldn’t have done those things the desk man had described. The middle-aged cleaning woman he had nearly bumped into as she got off the service elevator on the abandoned 8th floor – the HORRORWOOD floor – of the Migliore department store...only another coincidence. The murdered cleaning woman and the one he had encountered might be two different people. After all, he had seen that black-garbed figure attack the young woman in the factory, he had watched him...another man, a separate entity, not him...not a mirrored reflection of himself, not a doppelganger, not some golem grown from a ginseng-like homunculus, not some evil spirit who had stolen his flesh while his own displaced soul gazed helplessly through the bathroom window...

Straightening, another thought dawning on him, Ford turned about gingerly and looked toward his backpack, where it rested on the stool accompanying the desk his silent TV sat upon. It was black like his clothing, and lumpen. His body remembered its presence, its weight on his back. Not heavy, like Bune carried on the back of the monk Jung, but a weight that he felt oddly naked without, so accustomed was he to it after today’s seemingly endless, labyrinthine wanderings.

Ford went to the backpack and took hold of the twin zippers at its top. He opened it about halfway down, enough for him to reach inside. But he hesitated, and it was several moments before he was able – again gingerly – to slip his right hand into its captured darkness.

Almost instantly he withdrew his arm with a strangled cry, as if a snake coiled in the backpack had bitten his hand. But although the thing he had touched had been slithery, it had been nothing as solid as that, nothing with fangs. Breathing hard, steeling himself, he then reached in again, took hold of what he had touched – something so light against his fingers that it seemed ethereal – and jerked it out abruptly. He let it drop to the floor at his blistered, shoeless feet, which shuffled back from the object timidly.

It was actually two objects that he had drawn out, he realized, partially tangled together. One was a shining blue-black color, the other dyed a lighter brownish shade, though otherwise they were similar. They were both the ponytails of women, both still clasped at one end with an elastic ring.

Ford could only gaze down at them a long time without moving, without breathing, without even thinking. All he could really think was that the hair of both severed ponytails looked very silky to the touch, shining glossily in the room’s light. There was no blood on them that he could see, although they were admittedly dark in hue. They were not ugly in any way. In fact, they were beautiful...though he preferred the natural black color of the factory girl’s hair to the dyed brown hair of that attractive woman from the DVD store. Despite their beauty, however, they were the most ghastly things he had ever seen in his life, and he couldn’t imagine touching them again with his bare skin.

But he had not found the mask...that mask...and he stepped carefully around the ponytails to dip his hand into the backpack a third time. And this time, he touched something rubbery, loose, slick to the touch. He pinched its edge, began to pull it up through the unzipped top of the bag. But when he had the object half out, he let go of it and jumped backwards. His left heel came down on one of the slippery ponytails and his foot skidded before he sprang back again.

From a safe distance away, he stared at the visage that was hanging out of the top of the backpack, flopped down its nylon side. It was like a mask, but it was not a mask. It was the face of a middle-aged woman, in appearance somewhat like the mask of the character Halmi, an old woman living a life of hardship, from the Mask Play of Hahoe Byeolsin Exorcism.

11: Confessions of a Mask

Several times during the night he had gone to the little window in the bathroom and looked out at the window of the factory, but its entire inner surface had been covered with taped-up newspapers now...and anyway, the room beyond the newspapers was dark.

What had he expected to see there, had the window not been covered? Himself again, gazing ferally back at him? Where had he really been on the night when he had thought he was here, in this room? When he had thought he was awake, had he actually been dreaming – or the other way around? When they had briefly locked eyes and contemplated each other, which of the two selves had been the flesh, and which the figment?

Please let it be a demon in me, he thought, pacing his little room, the TV mindlessly prattling in a succession of incomprehensible voices, speaking in tongues. A demon using me as a puppet, he pleaded, a demon that can be exorcized. Please don’t let this thing be me...

How could it be him? How could such a thing have developed in him, lived inside him, bloomed into full-blown independent life? How could he have contained such a force? Such a hatred?

But if it was him, and not some possessing spirit, this couldn’t have been seeded in him – grown in him – here. It would have needed to ferment too long for that. But maybe, maybe, he considered, this country, this city, these women, had been catalysts for its emergence.

Ford had not found the mask amongst his belongings, or in the drawers of the desk, under the mattress, anywhere. It remained sadistically, triumphantly elusive. Maybe the pallid, hollow-eyed countenance he saw in the mirror was the mask...and that darker, leering face hid beneath it.

He looked out at the factory a last time before he closed the frosted sliding panes of the bathroom window, one after another. “I’m sorry,” he whispered across to the girl, his eyes dampening. “I’m so sorry...”

It was not just guilt for what he had done to her. It was guilt for not having called the police then, and not planning on calling the police now.

He did not sleep at all that night...to his knowledge, at least. As sunrise drew nearer he showered, and before donning new clothes – making a conscious decision not to wear all black again – he focused on some scratches on his left hand that he hadn’t taken much note of before. They looked a bit scabby, not too fresh. He remembered how he had had the impression that the girl had managed to claw her assailant when he was holding her down out of view, this attempt at self defense inflaming his anger. She had drawn his blood before he had drawn hers. If only she had killed him before he could kill her, he thought. It would have been a better outcome for the both of them.

Using the end of his toothbrush, he finally found the courage to prod that mask-like rag of skin down into the backpack again. Peeking inside, holding his breath, he saw a dully shining black object underneath the excised flesh. He recognized it as a box-cutter knife, with its blade retracted. Surely he hadn’t brought it with him; it never would have got past the multiple X-rays he had undergone to arrive here. Where might he have purchased it – in that nexus of streets called Namdaemun Market? Now that he thought of its many stalls and shops, he recalled seeing a number of backpacks for sale there...

Ford stole downstairs before it was even fully light outside, hoping to avoid being seen. No one was at the front desk. He walked along hilly gray streets between gray buildings, some new and some ancient, the latter with those pagoda-like roofs. For all its bright color, gray was Seoul’s predominate hue, he felt. Even the predawn sky was a kind of bluish gray.

He saw a cardboard box full of trash set out on the curb in front of an apartment building. Into this he dropped one of the ponytails, too quickly to see which one. He hated touching it with his naked skin again, but he couldn’t take the time to wrap his hand in swaths of tissue first like he had done when he’d loaded the backpack. On one steep street – its stony pavement graded into ribs, perhaps to afford traffic better traction or simply to further torture his feet – he saw another, bigger box left out on the sidewalk. He was too impatient, too nervous to keep dispersing the contents of the backpack. This time, he glanced about him furtively, stuffed the entire nylon bag deep into the box between other bits of refuse, then hastened down the sloping street and around the corner, hating the brash clomping sound of his big American shoes.

He found a café that was open, where he could sit for a while with a fairly good cappuccino in front of him and the sullen counter girl sweeping behind him (don’t look at her, he told himself, don’t turn around), until he thought the market might begin conducting business. When he located it again, with a minor degree of difficulty, Namdaemun Market was wide awake and already thronged. In searching for a stall that sold backpacks, he kept an eye open for one that offered box-cutter knives. There were a number of shops selling tools, and although he didn’t see any box-cutters displayed outside, it was not inconceivable that he had acquired his at one of these places.

He did, at least, find a variety of backpacks for sale at one stall, and he was able to buy a black model with orange lining and trim. His original had been entirely black, but he liked the Halloween partnership of orange and black.

At one point, winding his way back toward the guest house, he looked up to see the titanic pair of eyes on the flank of the high-rise department store Migliore, blue eyes like his own blue eyes glaring down at him accusingly. It made him feel defensive, as if he himself were a kind of victim.

But maybe he was! As if it were a scrap of flotsam to keep him from drowning, he still clung to the desperate hope that he was under some outside influence. Think of the countless hours of actors projecting into the ether the mask play’s characters – the maddened, guilt-ridden butcher, and the degenerate rapist monk. Being a stranger here, an empty bottle, wasn’t it possible that he had become a receptacle for those hungry energies, thought forms given their own existence like a Tibetan monk’s tulpa?

And then, too, hadn’t he read that the masks themselves held great spiritual power? That they would laugh after the actor laughed, become angry after the actor portrayed anger? Couldn’t it be that one of these mask’s spirits had reached out to him, and turned the tables on him...making him angry after it became angry? Angry at the impetuous foreigner who had come clomping ignorantly and irreverently into this mystical, alien land?

Because he didn’t hate Asian women! He respected them, admired them, coveted them! He had read in books, and heard from women at work like the married Vietnamese woman he had developed an aching crush on, how they looked after their men, pampered them...fed them when they were hungry, massaged them when they were sore. They were so graceful, so feminine; he had come to consider American women crass, vulgar, tomboyish in comparison. For so, so many years now he had longed for a woman from the mysterious Orient.

The closest he had come to acquiring one of them had come a year before he passed a love note to that Asian teenager in the town library. He had been fixed up with a blind date, a friend of his best friend’s girl. His buddy’s girl was Caucasian but her friend was half Asian. Half Korean, in fact, now that he thought of it! He had been both thrilled and dismayed to meet her and see how pretty she was. Her hair was almost auburn in color. He exchanged tense hellos with her father before the four of them left for the movies; the father had met the mother while he was a soldier stationed in Korea, and his military background showed in his gruff demeanor. As for the girl, whose name he could no longer recall, he could tell from the start that she did not find him attractive. She spoke more to her friend than to him, barely even looked at him. Before the film started they did chat briefly; she told him the last thing she’d seen was an animated movie about a unicorn. He had taken her to see Videodrome. He and his friend laughed about their choice of movie, later on – at least they had liked it. And of course, he had never seen or heard from the girl after that night. Well, what had he expected, with his untucked flannel shirt, his big dirty work boots? She had struck him as snobby, so he didn’t feel sad as much as he simply felt embarrassed. He was embarrassed even now, recalling that night. No wonder he hadn’t remembered the half-Korean girl until this moment. Sometimes memories can become mercifully shielded.

But he had not given up, over two decades later; he still loved Asian women. He meant them no harm. He would not really go back to the travel agency, when he returned home, and kill that lovely girl with the uncanny gray contact lenses, as he had told An he would do in an email...even if it was her fault that his visa had been prepared with the incorrect date on it. No – he would be sure not to go near that travel agency again, not even to demand a refund. But he would keep an eye on the Worcester, Massachusetts newspapers, when he was home, to make sure that he spotted nothing...awful...in them.

He saw the sign for the guest house ahead, as he plodded up the street with his new backpack riding empty on his shoulders. Now that his final errands were taken care of he was ready to ask the guy with the injured eye to give the Vietnam Embassy a call about that new visa.

Everything would be alright soon. An would be his dream come true, the fulfillment of his fantasies, the balm on his soul. And she was still alive. He made himself recall that he had read messages by her in the past few days, since he had been deported from her country. Last night, during his hours of pacing, he had been haunted for a while by the fear that he might have...done something to her already, during the short time he had spent in her country. Had he met her at the airport, after all, and didn’t recall it now? Had he tried to do her some harm, and was that the real reason the immigration officers had put him on a plane back to Korea? But he excavated through his memories roughly, and he found nothing to support those suspicions.

No, An was safe. He would not hurt his An. He knew her already; she was not a stranger. He loved her, and she loved him; she swore she did, vowed that she was not merely after US citizenship. No, An would be safe. The doppelganger would remain behind in this country. He would will it to stay here. He hoped to see its tiny black figure standing on the tarmac of the runway, gazing up at him, as his plane lifted above the hilly landscape of South Korea. It would be wearing the mask, that missing mask. It would be the exiled one, the deported one...the rejected one...not him.

Ford stood at the front desk, waited while his man made the call to the embassy. While waiting, he glowered defiantly at those two full-sized masks close at hand, Yangban and the raped girl, Bune. He had never known about Korea’s traditional masks before, because he didn’t know as much about this country as he did Japan or Vietnam. Japan had its No play masks, and a samurai’s armor might contain a fierce menpo war mask.

He knew that Vietnam had its own masks, too. For centuries, masks made of rattan or bamboo, called mat mo or mat met, with faces painted on them, had been used in special rites to banish evil spirits. Various colors were used, in painting them, to express the range of emotions. And again, as with the theatrical Japanese No masks and Korean masks, the Vietnamese had used masks in their tuong operas.

He had always been fascinated by masks, and had hoped to encounter these Vietnamese sorts that he’d read about. He might purchase one, he thought, and bring it home for a souvenir.

After all his trials and tribulations – a test, perhaps, to prove just how devoted he was to meeting his An – things went a bit more smoothly for him now. His document was ready as promised. His disfigured friend drove him to the embassy, he picked up his passport with the new visa pasted inside, he walked back through the embassy gates onto the street, and within five minutes he was in a cab on his way to the domestic Gimpo Airport. From Gimpo he took a shuttle bus to Incheon International Airport. There, downstairs, he bought new tickets to and from Vietnam from a travel agent (a woman, but middle-aged, and without disturbingly alluring gray eyes). He would need to wait more hours than he cared for, but he had a few books in his backpack that he could read, and he killed some time and filled his belly sitting in a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

He emailed An from one of the airport’s little internet cafés. “I’m coming, ba xa,” he told her.

The flight wouldn’t be terribly long; it was nothing compared to the leg of the journey from Texas to Korea. He tried to doze, but couldn’t, and so he unzipped his new backpack – tucked down near his feet instead of stored in the overhead compartment – and decided to browse through his travel guide to Vietnam.

But in reaching into his bag, his fingers touched something soft, pliant, slithery. He flinched, almost gasped, and the Vietnamese man seated to his right glanced over at him, but Ford quickly composed himself.

At first he had thought it was the face of the cleaning woman that he had touched. But his fingers had brushed a kind of raised circle, and he knew what this was. It was a flattened lump or tumor molded onto a forehead made of rubber, a growth shaped like the head of a huge spike driven deeply into a skull.

(Upper left breast of T-Shirt, FRONT:)

Scared Shirtless

(BACK of T-Shirt:)

There are as many portals to other dimensions as there are other dimensions. Some of these portals are ostentatious, such as the circle of megalithic standing stones in a secret cave under the jungle at the border between Vietnam and Laos. Others are as humble as a graffiti door painted on the wall of a subway tunnel in Boston’s “Blue Line”. Some portals have been open for thousands of years, others blink open for barely a second. There is just such a humble portal to alien planes of existence in the neck-hole of this very T-shirt (and all its identical garments). A subtle but disturbing pattern in the fabric’s weave engenders this effect. When one thrusts his or her head through the opening in this piece of apparel, one can view the manifold realities of the universe (though which of these alternate realities depends upon the alignment of the planets at that particular moment). When wearing this shirt, one might be able to perceive the hidden anatomies of the people around him – such anatomies either unspeakably hideous or unbearably beautiful. One day, the wearer might see unnamed colors churning all around him. Another day, the wearer might observe animals like a cross between insects and clockwork machines, gnawing at the auras the human form exudes. Instead of one’s living room, the wearer may perceive himself to be standing in a gorgeous but abandoned and decaying city. There is a danger, however, not only to the owner of such a garment but also to those who come into contact with him. As one reads these words, a sort of ritualistic chant begins to be repeated by the subconscious mind. This chant in itself opens more dimensions, unfolds layer upon layer of further realities, until the universe blooms before the reader like a radiant flower. But this flower can also be hungry, can lunge and snap its jaws and swallow the reader of these lines into one of the infinite realms. In fact, if you have read this far, then the chant has already begun in your own mind. Cosmic layers are spreading open like petals. The comb-like teeth of the universe-flower grin and glisten. The mouth may not swallow you soon, but it will swallow you. It will consume you. You will vanish from this mundane plane of existence. Yet we shall see each other again – when I don this T-shirt once more. I will see you standing on the bank of a river of living blood. Or I will see you at the heart of a cloud of those voracious insect-machines. But I will not be able to touch or help you. The most I can do is strip this transfigured article of clothing over my head – and shut out your image before it burns the delicate fabric of my mind, and of my very soul. (For the love of all things holy, do not bleach or wash in hot water.)

The Burning House

1: The Angel

After Michael stepped through the doorway of blinding light, he found himself in a room lined in white ceramic tiles, floor and ceiling included. The room’s only feature was a riveted metal hatch with a wheel-like valve in its center, and he saw this immediately turn with a squeal. A blast of steam entered the small white chamber...followed by the first Demon Michael had met since his death, several months earlier.

“Greetings, sir,” the thing said, unfolding to its full height. At eight feet tall, it had had to stoop to fit its body through the hatchway. “I am Iblis Al-Qadim – governor of this sector of Hades.”

Michael almost said, automatically, “Nice to meet you” or “thanks for having me”, so stunned into a sleepwalker’s state was he by the thing’s appearance. He had taken an involuntary step backwards as it had joined him in this, one of apparently countless entry points into the netherworld.

Iblis Al-Qadim’s heavy black robes did not fully hide the fact that his body was an unpleasant cross between human skeleton and insect exoskeleton. His face was more human, but a human long dead, his skin a mere black parchment clinging to jutting bone, twin stars gleaming in the deep wells of his skull sockets. Even his teeth were black, in a lipless and humorless grin. He wore a black metal miter, making him all the more towering, intricate patterns of holes in this officious headpiece showing the green flames that blazed from the top of his skull...where it had apparently been sawed open to emit them.

He carried a staff of iron with a strange swirling design at its head, either a sign of office or a weapon’s blade, or both. His shoulders were bulked with a framework under the robes to make his width more commanding, as if taking a cue from football players (maybe if the ball were a human head), and on one of these shoulders perched and squirmed what Michael at first took to be some kind of familiar. It was a black octopus, its head so bloated with, perhaps, the gases it breathed that the stretched skin was almost translucent. It had small, bat-like wings growing out of the sides of its head, above its golden eyes with their horizontal pupils.

Despite that rasping whisper of a voice coming from the scarecrow-like giant’s jaws, Michael had the strange intuition that – rather than being a mere familiar – it was the octopus that was in charge, and the looming skeleton creature merely its vehicle and mouthpiece. Were they both, then, Iblis Al-Qadim?

Seeing that Michael was still dazed, at a loss, the official went on, “Was it not your wife’s intention to join you, sir?”

Michael recovered enough of his voice to stammer, “Yes...well...not today. We decided it was best, after all, if I came here first by myself to assess the situation, so I could go back and...prepare her for it.”

“I see. Very good, sir.” The thing tipped its head slightly and pointed a finger twice as long as one of Michael’s at the belt gathering his white, angelic robes. A holster was clipped onto this belt, and from the holster protruded the grip of a handgun. “Did you intend to do some hunting, as well, during your stay?”

“Hunting?” Michael looked down at his gun himself, and then became horrified when he grasped the entity’s meaning. Horrified, and outraged. But even though he was an immortal Angel – and this creature, however seemingly important, a lowly Demon who could be killed because he had no immortal soul – Michael was too intimidated to raise his voice to the being. He kept his tone stern but even. “My son is one of the Damned now, is he not? So I should hardly think I’d want to hunt any of the Damned for sport.”

“I see, sir. Many do, of course.”

“I’m aware of that. And those Angels should be here in place of many of the Damned. But my Father works in ways even more mysterious than I suspected when I was alive.”

The Demon paused with apparent discomfort. “That isn’t for me to say, sir.”

“The gun is for my protection,” Michael explained tersely.

“We will see that no Damned assault you during your stay. And of course, you are not capable of being killed, or injured for very long, so...”

“I’m well aware of that.”

“Of course you are, sir. In any case...allow me to take you to your quarters, now. We have insured your comfort, for the duration of your stay.”

“Thank you, but I’d really rather get to where my son is, as quickly as I can.”

“Yes, as I understand, sir...but you see, first we must ascertain his whereabouts, and we will assist you in every way we can, in that endeavor.”

“His whereabouts?” Now Michael felt too great a heat rising in him to be cowed by the cadaverous titan. “What do you mean? Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know where my son is?”

“We know the general vicinity, sir...we feel confident he is still in this territory that I govern, and that is why you were directed to this portal. But we have not yet been able to narrow down his exact location.”

“I don’t believe this!” Michael snapped. “This is unacceptable! My son is suffering here, do you understand? He’s in Hell and he could be tied to a stake in the middle of a bonfire right this moment!”

“You see, sir, there is a breakdown in our former lines of communication. Gaps, and irregularities. Our methods of intelligence gathering, and monitoring of the Damned, have become eroded. I’m sure you have been informed of the conflict we are facing here – the rebellion of certain breeds of the more human-like Demons. These species are to be phased out, but they are resisting violently. There is an atmosphere of chaos, I am sorry to report, that has...”

“Look,” the Angel snarled, retaking that step he had lost when the monster had entered the portal chamber with him, “I want my son located immediately, do you understand? I don’t care if it takes every Demon in your jurisdiction...I want him found! I want my boy brought to me!”

“We will do that, sir. But you understand, of course...even when we find him, you may not bring him out of Hades with you. You can not take him to Heaven. He will still be one of the Damned.”

“I am only too aware of that, believe me. I am only too fucking aware that my son is damned for all eternity because he didn’t have a little holy water dribbled on his head by some fucking child-molesting priest...doomed the same as murderers and rapists because a few words weren’t said to placate the Creator that I’d put my trust in for my entire fucking life!”

“It is a pity,” the Demon stated in its emotionless, sepulchral hiss. “But as a religious man, sir – if I may presume to ask you this question – why did you not have your child baptized, since you and your wife obviously were yourselves?”

“My wife is my second wife; my son’s stepmother. She was a Catholic in life, as I was. But my first wife – my son’s mother – was always an atheist. She was very adamant about my son not becoming baptized or even attending church until he was old enough to make that decision for himself, as an adult.”

“And you gave in to her desires.”

“I gave in. Yes, I gave in.” Michael was still seething. His voice trembled with his stoppered fury.

“It must have been a great source of enmity between your wife and yourself – you being devout, and she denying the Creator.”

“That’s why she’s my ex-wife...isn’t it?”

“And she is still in the world of the living?”

“She’s alive, yes. She’s there, still breathing...still not believing. Maybe even disbelieving more than ever, in her grief. But she’ll learn one day, won’t she? Learn how wrong she was. When she joins her son in Hades. And then she can apologize to him. She’d fucking damn well better apologize to him!”

“Come, sir,” Iblis Al-Qadim said, sweeping his arm, in a tone that almost sounded sympathetic. “Let me take you to your quarters. And I assure you – the search is already underway.”

“Why did I listen to her? Why was I so weak?” the Angel lamented.

“Sir?” The Demon had his hand on the metal door’s wheel.

Michael grunted, and in starting forward met the eyes of the mollusk-thing poised like a parrot on one of the Demon’s shoulders. An uncanny intelligence glowed in them. He remembered what Iblis Al-Qadim had said – the human-like Demons being gradually phased out, because of the revolts incited by several demonic races. Was he looking at Iblis Al-Qadim’s replacement-in-training?

He saw that one of its glistening tentacles had reached out and curled with insidious slowness around the handle of that great iron staff.

2: The Damned

Before they became lovers, both of them had lain with Demons.

In one region of Hades, Roger had been captured in his wanderings by a group of Apsaras, as their breed had been named by the Damned (since the Demons themselves tended not to give appellations to their many races). The blue-skinned Apsaras were beautiful and terrifying, with voluptuous perfumed bodies and long black hair that swam in the air above their heads endlessly as if they were drowned women under the sea, their dark eyes blazing and tusk-like fangs curving up from their lips. During his confinement, which may have lasted a year or more (how could he judge?), the Apsaras would seize him and arouse him against his will...rape him. Somewhere in the course of this – like a female mantis consuming the head of her mate as he copulates with her – the Demon would rip his throat open with her fangs, or dismount him as he climaxed and tear off his manhood with her powerful hands (it seemed to be a sport, with the Apsaras, to pluck the organ just as it squirted), or bite off his member as she fellated him, or slash his scrotum open with her long nails to eat the savory oysters of his testes. But there were male Demons in this territory as well, incubi known as the Asuras, and they had performed their own brand of sex acts on him, or forced him to perform acts upon them, followed by the usual mutilations. These torments became almost mundane (if no less excruciating) with time, and of course he always fully recovered later on, regenerating whole once more so that he could be rent afresh the next time around.

Davina, on the other hand, had served as one of the living spawning machines in the city of Tartarus, where many species of Demon were manufactured, so to speak, by Damned laborers. Usually the processes employed were more mechanical in nature; Demons were baked from various ingredients like cakes or injection-molded like plastic, grown in dark cellars like mushrooms or developed in bubbling solution like fetal clones – but certain types of these homunculi, these infernal golems, gestated inside human hosts. The sort of Demon that had been grown inside Davina’s body were dubbed Kilcrops – ghastly cadaverous things, always laughing, that never seemed to mature beyond adolescence. She had been captured by a roving Demon squad, taken to Tartarus and put to this use. On a regular basis, she had been raped by the incubus breed called the Asuras. She had lost count of the pregnancies (maybe two hundred?), each lasting what she thought of as thirty days. There was no actual day or night, but the Damned counted days in terms of work periods. Then again, the work periods were so very long.

The farm girls, as they thought of themselves, were treated fairly well, aside from the rapes that planted the devil seed, but even those were intended more as business than punishment. Not that it made much of a difference to Davina. To her knowledge, no laborer had ever escaped a city so full of Demons as Tartarus, but after a while the farm girls and other workers were released and replaced with new souls. Her understanding of this was: rather than being a mercy, or a thanks for their service, it was to insure that they did not get too comfortable in Hades. Again, even a torture could seem commonplace and predictable with repetition. A man, say, locked in a hanging cage and pecked at by an infernal breed of crow would be liberated after a time (maybe a week, a month, a decade by human measurement), so as to wander free for a while and encounter fresh manifestations of anguish.

*     *     *

Hades was full of settlements, either constructed and populated entirely by the Damned, or else by the Damned and the Demons in combination. There was everything from thatch-roofed hamlets to metropolises of soaring high-rises, these skyscrapers either familiar or uncanny in their varied outlines. Many times the look of the town or city had to do with the period of human history its Damned citizens came from, though mostly these characteristics became blurred and blended with the coming of new generations.

Certain colonies of Hades alternated between freezing cold and scorching hot, as if each day contained the seasons of a year. Some were built in the shadow of glaciers, where it was eternally frigid, sleet ever stinging the skin, the rooms of the buildings heated with whatever meager measures the Damned themselves could devise.

Other cities were ever burning. Maybe not with blistering, charring earthly fire – how then could the citizenry move about freely, so as to roam to the next place of suffering? – but with a lesser blue flame that nonetheless consumed a city like Apollyon entirely, the flames lapping high into the air so that every street, every room was filled with this hot blue light, so that it filled your mouth when you spoke or slept. It needed no fuel, it never ran out, it was silent and did not crackle. After a while, you could almost forget the pain it caused in every nerve of your body. Almost.

Roger and Davina had drifted to the city of Apollyon at about the same time; it was where they met. He had been an atheist in life, a British soldier killed by a German machine gun in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, when he was twenty-eight years old. In September of 1993, at the age of twenty-three, Davina had been killed along with eleven-thousand other Indian people in an earthquake. She assumed all eleven-thousand victims, being Hindus rather than devout Christians, must be here in Hades with her. He assumed a fair number of the million-plus casualties of the Somme offensive were here for one reason or another, as well. But Hades was infinite. Hades had room enough for all.

The first time Roger and Davina had made love, the sea of flame they were submerged in caused so much pain to their uncovered bodies that it left little room for pleasure. But they stared at each other’s faces as he lay atop her. And they smiled.

Later, they had met the boy. Mark had died only recently, and Apollyon was the first city he’d encountered. He told them he had burned to death at the age of eight, and it was his opinion that he was in Hades not only because he wasn’t baptized, but because he had caused the fire that had killed him...and his parents.

Roger and Davina had pitied the child. They had taken him in as a kind of son, and it was this act as much as their love that made them kind of a husband and wife. Kind of a family.

*     *     *

At least paper did not burn in the blue flame, and the Demons of Apollyon apparently did not deem it worth their time to otherwise destroy the books that Roger and his fellow workers produced, nor the presses they printed them on. Roger was adept with machines, and had helped improve these presses and the binding equipment – all designed and built by the Damned over many years – since settling in Apollyon. Currently, he was inking up one of the presses to resume work on a slim volume called Beautiful Hell, a memoir written by a Damned author who had stumbled upon this city and left the manuscript in their care until he should return.

“Mark.” he called, looking up but not seeing his boy. “Bring me a fresh can of black, will you?”

A clatter, a clunk (please don’t have spilled another can of ink! thought Roger), and the child appeared from another room, bearing a metal can, looking eager to be of help. His adoptive father even paid him several coins of the netherworld’s currency, every “week”, for the scraps of work he performed about the shop.

Roger noticed a smear of red on the boy’s beaming face, and grew concerned, straightened up. “Did you cut yourself?”

Setting the can down, Mark touched his cheek, examined his stained fingertips. He laughed. “No, Rog...it’s red ink. I was putting some cans away!”

His own hands slicked with black pigment, fashioned from native minerals and flora, Roger reached out and dabbed some ink on the boy’s other cheek. “There. You can at least be stained in the same color as me.”

“Hey!” The boy flashed out his own hand, and ran his reddened fingertips down Roger’s forearm, leaving smudges. “Now you’re stained the same as me!”

“Watch it, watch it,” Roger said, drawing back in a futile attempt to avoid the swipe. In doing so, he felt an unpleasant grinding sensation in his chest, as he did from time to time depending on the nature of his movements. He often felt it while making love with Davina, and she swore she could feel the outline of the shape tucked against his ribs, though he himself could not.

“Why did you ever do that?” she would scold him in her musical accent, her heavy black brows lowered.

“You can cut it out of me if you want,” he would tease.

It was not only groups, large and small, of Demons that had begun to revolt and skirmish with the Celestial infantry sent to squash them, and with their own brother races of Demons as well. No, even groups of the Damned had taken up weapons against their Demon and Celestial oppressors alike, lashing out through guerilla warfare, terrorist acts, even full-scale battle on occasion. There had even been cases where Demons and Damned had fought together in uneasy alliance. It was a turbulent time for the eternal afterlife.

Several “months” ago, a major clash had spilled over into Apollyon. The wounded remnants of a Damned rebel outfit had taken shelter in the city, pursued by a type of Demon Roger had not as yet encountered despite his many years here; a race of bipedal tick-like creatures with pale greenish chitin. He assumed it was a brand new breed, designed as a replacement for one of the humanoid species, deemed less trustworthy now. The Damned fighters had had a few guns among them. Roger figured they had stolen these weapons from some Angels who were in Hades as tourists, or to hunt the Damned for sport, or to help out in the fight against the Damned for the sheer joy of battle (being Angels, they could quickly reconstitute after even the most grievous wounds).

Roger himself had been a witness to one messy clash, in which the last of these particular rebels were overpowered and captured by those immense ticks with their awful, scythe-like praying mantis forelimbs, and other sets of arms ending in hooks, blades and pincers like surgical – or dissecting – instruments. One of the rebels had been dropped to the cobblestoned street, an arm lopped off, and had met Roger’s eyes as he wailed. Roger had wanted to look away in shame for not going to the man’s aid or defense. But the carnage he had experienced on Europe’s battlefields, the horrors that had sent his immortal soul here, had scarred him in a way his mock cells could not repair, however miraculous their mending abilities. Or was it simply that his time in Hades had made him cowed, defeated, a dog with his growl beaten out of him? One might think that having participated in so much violence in life and endured so much violence in the afterlife would make him inured to killing, make it easy for him to resume his life as a soldier...but Roger could not see himself ever taking part in a war again.

Even though he had not gone to the wounded man, however, the gun the fighter had been gripping went spinning out of the hand of his severed arm and ended up not far from Roger’s boot. He was standing outside the print shop, and a coworker of Roger’s had hissed at him from behind, “Rog! The gun! Get it...”

Mindlessly, Roger had taken a step toward the gun, a little semiautomatic pistol of a type designed after his time on Earth; a .25 caliber, he deduced. The gun was closer than the injured man. He might furtively retrieve the weapon without entering into the battle itself, as he would if he gripped that man’s remaining, outstretched hand.

He didn’t know if it were because he scooped up the little pistol, or because the Demon mistook him as one of the actual insurgents, but as he rose he saw a tick scurrying at him, blood from the Damned sloshing darkly in its swollen abdomen, its arms flailing, and the next thing he knew he was on his back, his chest split wide, blood spraying up from him in a fountain. He had to close his eyes against it. The spray went into his own mouth, as if to keep the fountain recycling.

Bullets from somewhere – another of the rebels – crashed into the Demon, causing both its and its victims’ blood to spatter the cobblestones, and it fell convulsing with a terrible screech. Demons could die, because they had no souls, and this one proceeded to do so.

“Rog!” his coworker cried. This man and another dragged their friend back onto the sidewalk, then around the corner, out of sight. His coworker took the gun from Roger’s hand, examined it a moment, looked down at the wound that would have killed a mortal man. “Rog, you need to keep this. We need to hide it.” He pointed the little weapon at that terrible pumping gash. “Let me put it in there, Rog. No one will find it, and you can always get it out again if you need it.”

“No,” the other man said, “it could be found if he’s tortured and cut open some day. They’d put him in a snake pit for a fucking century, for having that...”

“Quiet! Rog...”

Did he nod or gurgle his assent? Maybe he did, in his delirium, or maybe his friend simply interpreted Roger’s agony that way; he couldn’t himself recall, so blanked with pain was he at the time. But the next thing he knew, his coworker was stuffing that hard lump of metal deep inside him like a crude lover.

The coworker had vanished from Apollyon a week later. Rumor was that the fighting had stirred him, and he himself had joined the rebel movement. And the gun...the gun still lay inside Roger’s chest, healed without trace of a scar – not even the scars of the German machine gun bullets. Inside him like a black pearl. A hunk of shrapnel. Like a dead, cold organ.

“You okay, Rog?” the boy asked, noticing the wince, seeing the man’s hand involuntarily touch his upper chest. “Did I hurt you?”

“No...I’m fine, fine.” Roger smiled at him, but sadly. He hated to hear him fill so quickly with guilt, with self-blame. And he wished Mark wouldn’t call him Rog. Or Davina, Davina. Maybe someday, he hoped, the boy would truly think of them as his parents.

*     *     *

Roger and Davina were awakened by the sound of a child’s screams.

There were two bedrooms in the little flat they rented; Mark’s room was the smaller, but that was like saying the other room was the larger of two closets. Both had space enough for the bed they contained, and not much else. There were lanterns and candles for light, but even with them extinguished the air had that constant blue glow. Cold burning fire, filling each room to its ceiling. When Roger and Davina opened their eyelids, it took a blinking moment or two to readjust to the pain against their bare eyeballs. It was Davina who slipped out of bed first, her skin very brown against the white pajamas she had made for herself, and shuffled barefoot from the room. Roger trailed after, not as swiftly. He knew what the screaming was about. It was not the first time.

“What is it, my baby? What’s wrong?” Davina cooed, sitting on the edge of the bed and gathering Mark up into her embrace. He wrung her in his arms, his face pressed into her chest.

“Fire,” the boy spluttered through his tears. “The fire...”

“I know, my darling. I know.” Davina rocked him. She glanced up at Roger, framed in the room’s threshold.

As concerned as he was for the boy’s anguish, he couldn’t help but smile proudly, affectionately at the sight of him in his lover’s arms. Her thick black hair, curly as Medusa’s, wild around her face. Those huge black eyes, so solemn and concerned. Could there ever have been a more affecting portrait of a Madonna? Still meeting his eyes, she kissed the top of the boy’s head and whispered comfort to him.

“It’s my fault,” he wept. “I killed my Mom and Dad...I killed them...”

“No, my dear. No...”

“I did! I did!”

“It was an accident, my love.”

“It doesn’t matter...it’s my fault...I killed them! I killed my Mom and Dad!”

At last, Roger came to the bed and sat beside Davina, took one of the boy’s hands and clasped it between both of his. “That’s not why you’re here, Mark.”

“I’m bad! I’m bad!”

“No. Look at me. Look at Davina. Are we bad, too, Mark?”

The boy didn’t raise his face from her warm breasts, but his muffled voice said, “No-o...”

“It’s not fair, the things that happen. The fire. Us being here. Not fair, then, is it? But we don’t have to accept it. We may have to live with the pain of things, but we don’t have to accept them. I don’t accept that I belong here. I don’t accept that you belong here. That’s what makes us human – that freedom they can’t beat from us or bleed from us – and I’ve found that being human is more important than being an Angel. Or a...deity.” He sighed, still holding the child’s hand. “I must not be making sense to you. But, what I’m saying is, they can punish us from now until the universe burns out, but that doesn’t make us evil. And you, my boy, are a beautiful, beautiful soul who would shame the most powerful, most lordly, meanest and ugliest God that anyone could ever worship.”

Davina put a hand to the back of Roger’s head, stroked it, and spread her lips in a smile.

3: The Searchers

Dawn hid her face in her hands, as if they might staunch the flow of her tears...as if, if she refused to look at her surroundings long enough they would be gone when she uncovered her eyes, and she would be in Paradise again instead of this apartment provided for her and her husband, here in Hades.

Their Demon hosts no doubt believed they provided a comfortable and even beautiful environment for their angelic guests. The glistening, metallic scarabs that covered every inch of the walls were a living (in a sense) mosaic, that shifted every so often into an entirely new pattern of color and design. And even though Michael had assured her that last night the beetles had not swarmed off the walls and across him in his bed, she still shuddered at their numbers all around her. It wasn’t these creatures, though, that had brought her to such a state...but having been met by Iblis Al-Qadim and two lesser Demons, upon her arrival into the netherworld. Even though Michael had gone back to Paradise to fetch her personally, had told her what to expect, and held her hand when that metal hatch in the white-tiled wall squealed open, she had still gasped and squeezed her eyes shut at her first sight of the three skeletal devils – the looming governor with flame lapping out of the top of his head, inside the black miter he wore, and his two attendants: comparatively smaller and without headgear, a luminous green smoke wisping out of their open skulls in place of their superior’s emerald fire.

Neither of the lesser Demons had a black cephalopod perched on one shoulder, and the one on the governor’s shoulder seemed to have become more affectionate, or aggressive, in the mere hours since Michael had last seen it. It now had one of its slinking arms coiled tightly around Iblis Al-Qadim’s scrawny neck, like a noose.

But now Michael and Dawn were alone, and her sobs were finally diminishing...though she still refused the ice water he offered her from a pitcher. He didn’t proffer any of the brilliantly red unknown fruit, heaped for them in a silver bowl. Even he thought they looked too much like the small hearts of human children.

“And to think that Mark is in this place, huh?” Michael told her, pacing as she sat on the edge of the bed. “This is how you feel, even though you know you can return to Heaven anytime you want. Imagine being stuck in this place forever. And this,” he waved an arm around the room, “this isn’t how the Damned live, down here.” He still couldn’t help but think of Hades as being “down”, as if beneath the Earth’s rind, though he knew it was more like a parallel dimension.

“Terrible,” Dawn sniffled, at last lowering her slick hands from eyes burned red. “Terrible. I don’t think I ever really believed in a Hell,” she admitted quietly, as if she herself might be damned by the confession, “did you?”

“Yes,” her husband muttered.

“I’m not even sure...I hate to say it, Mike...but I’m not even sure I really, really believed in a Heaven. I mean, I went to church every Sunday, like I was expected to...the way my parents did. But, I don’t know...I didn’t like to really think about an afterlife, even a Paradise, because...it just didn’t seem possible...”

“You see? This is what I don’t understand. The Father only counts the heads that go through the doors of His churches – He doesn’t look into their hearts. If He did, a lot of the people in Heaven would be here, and innocents like my son would be with us in Paradise. Instead of judging you by your acts, your purity, He’s...petty. He’ll throw you into the pit for buttering the wrong side of the bread.”

“Honey,” she looked up, “shhh!”

“I don’t care. I don’t care anymore,” he grumbled. “I never thought that all Buddhists would go to Hell, even though I was told a million times there was only one way to get to Paradise – through the Son. I never believed every Muslim, every Jew, every atheist would be punished without even a look at their souls! It’s insane...it’s crueler than anything I could have imagined, even from Satan. And now, of course, I understand. There never was a Satan. Just our Dad – the big old Yin/Yang. He’s the real Lucifer. The angel of light, turned ruler of Hell. Angel and demon in one. Our Creator is the Devil.”

“Michael,” Dawn warned him, glancing with a start at the seething, rustling walls as the insects suddenly scurried over each other to reconfigure their positions. For a moment, she had thought the bugs would pour over her husband and eat him alive for his blasphemies.

“I would hate Him less if there were a Satan to blame for this.” He swept his arm around him again. “But Satan is the only Demon that was created by Man. The rest are His.”

“Enough, Michael, please.”

He whirled to glare at her, his goateed chin thrust forward. “I believed in Him! I worshipped Him! I was devout! And here is my son, only eight years old, in fucking Hell! They’d better find him, these monsters. They better bring me to him soon or they’ll see some real wrath.”

“I feel sorry for our parents,” Dawn said, letting her head sag. “They don’t know our souls live on. They might think we’re gone forever. My poor Mom and Dad. I’m so glad they’re baptized...church-goers. My brother, too.” She wagged her head. “They must be so heart-broken. Now they have to live the rest of their lives thinking about how young I was when I died. The horrible way that I died. It will haunt them, every Christmas, every time my birthday comes along.” She moaned. “Why did he have to fool around with matches...why?”

“You blame him,” Michael stated. She lifted her head. His sudden calm tone frightened her more than his furious rants. “You blame him for us being killed.”

“Michael, I’m only saying...”

“He’s a child. I played with fire, too, when I was a kid. Burning my toy soldiers, watching their faces melt. Seeing how paper burned, Styrofoam. Who left those matches out, by the way?”

“You always liked the candles I burned. Their smell,” Dawn managed weakly, close to tears again. “I thought you liked them...”

“You left the matches out.”

“So now it’s my fault? You say I hate Mark for doing this to us, but I don’t! I’ve gone to Paradise; I’m not the unlucky one, he is. But don’t you think that tortures me, too? I loved him! You might not believe that, but I loved him like he was my own son. It isn’t that I blame Mark...the thing is, you blame me! You blame me, for what happened to us. And for him being here.”

Michael came over to her, spreading his arms open, looking appropriately angelic in his white robes. With his slicked-back, short dark hair and neat goatee, she thought he resembled a modernized Jesus. He put his arms around her and she began sobbing, again, against his chest.

“I don’t blame you, baby. I don’t.” He rubbed her back in circles. “We didn’t make this place, did we? We didn’t make these rules. Look...there’s nothing you can really do here. There’s no sense in your staying. I’ll take you back.”

“But I wanted to be with you,” Dawn whimpered, clutching him. “And I wanted to see Mark. Really.”

“When I find him, I’ll come get you again.”

“But how long do you think you’ll be here, honey?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Well, if you find him, what then? We can’t take him back with us...”

“I don’t know, what then. All I know is I want to see my boy. I want to be sure he’s not in pain. I can’t bear it, Dawn...I can’t bear the thought of my boy suffering...”

*     *     *

The Demon seated importantly behind a desk of black marble resembled Iblis Al-Qadim and his underlings in that he appeared like an unwrapped and reanimated mummy, his jointed body vaguely insectoid, but above his skull-like face his head ballooned into a huge translucent sphere, almost like a boneless fluid-filled sack that Michael was surprised the thing’s neck could support. The governor and this Demon had exchanged a few guttural gurgles in an alien tongue, and now the globe-headed entity turned the fiery pinpricks of his eyes to Michael, staring at him intensely. It’s probing me telepathically, he thought, using me to get Mark’s scent. He could almost feel the Demon’s bony digits unraveling the knotted convolutions of his brain and fingering them like the beads of a rosary.

Seated opposite the creature, Michael fidgeted in his chair, vaguely nervous, as if he were a young man applying for his first job. But it had been a long time since Michael had squirmed before a superior. He had died a career military man, an officer, a decorated veteran of the Gulf War. A man on the ground, not on a plane, not directing rockets through windows as if playing a video game. He had two confirmed kills; two faces he had looked into before he had extinguished the life behind them. And were his victims in Hell with him, even now? He had heard that in Hades, infinite as it was, the Damned were prevented somehow from encountering their relatives or spouses, even their friends from life. Would that mean that when his first wife died, she would not be permitted to join her son? It must mean exactly that. He wished he could warn her, like Marley visiting Scrooge, to change her destiny. Despite how disillusioned he had become with his faith, Michael prayed that his former wife would change her mind about religion and become baptized at last, so that she could move about freely between Heaven and Hell as he did. So she could see her son again...if Mark truly could be located.

The globe-headed Demon broke their gaze, and Michael went a little limp in his chair. Had he merely been tensed, or had the thing’s brain been holding him transfixed? The Demon looked up at Iblis Al-Qadim and gave a gravelly hiss.

“You are in luck, sir,” the governor announced. “We have found him. It was helpful that he has not strayed considerably from his original point of entry. He is in a city called Apollyon – not far at all from this palace.”

“Take me there,” Michael said.

“As you wish, sir.”

Michael rose from his seat, and nodded at the telepathic Demon in a kind of gruff thanks. But he could feel no real gratitude. The Demons did not sympathize with his plight, were merely being courteous because he was an Angel. These were the things that inflicted misery upon the Damned...and who could tell what this being’s brothers might be doing to his child even now.

4: The Skull

As Roger and Mark wound their way through the twisty, narrow streets of Apollyon, returning home from the print shop, they passed a pair of emaciated, child-like Kilcrops, but the Demons only giggled at them horribly as they turned the corner. Glancing back at the creatures, Roger couldn’t help but wonder if either or both of them had been grown inside his lover’s body.

“One thing I like about Hell,” Mark resumed saying, now that the Demons were out of view, “is there’s no school here.”

“Now, now,” Roger scolded. “I should school you myself, just for saying that. You’re a smart boy...you shouldn’t be thinking that way.”

“But why should I learn things I’ll need when I grow up, if I’m never going to grow up?”

“Maybe that’s another good thing about Hell,” he muttered to himself. Never having to become an adult, that most awful of creatures excepting, perhaps, Demons. “It’s always important to learn and learn, as much as you can, and never ever stop learning. And there are cities and towns that have schools, you know – I’ve seen them.”

“I’d rather just work with you, instead. Because...” he produced a few coins from his pocket “...you don’t get paid for going to school.”

“Terrible. Why are you so terrible this evening?”

Mark laughed, but then stopped and said, “Wow...Rog...what is that thing?”

Still smiling, Roger turned his head to look at where the boy was pointing.

A moon appeared to hover above the roofs and chimneys, huge in the bluish sky of flame, but even as Roger watched the great sphere was floating closer, in their direction. The sphere was the color of bone, and skull-like sutures squiggled across its surface, and this was why the Damned had come to call the thing the Skull, though there were no other features. Roger had seen it before. Once, here in Apollyon, and in other colonies of the Damned as well. It migrated, wandered, seemingly at random. He was reminded of the Black Cathedral, on its networks of train tracks, and other such roving structures that one hoped never to see enter one’s town.

“Hurry up, Mark,” he said, reaching for the boy’s hand. He quickened his pace.

“What is it, Rog?”

“The Skull...”

“What does it do?”

“It’s a torture factory,” he told him.

Roger began to look about him for a shop that might be open, into which they might duck if need be. A stranger might even let them into their house, out of sympathy. Then again, they might not want to get involved, for fear of being gathered up by the crew of the Skull themselves.

“It’s getting close,” Mark said, sounding worried.

“I know. Here. Under here.” Roger broke into a little run, dragging Mark beneath a crumbling aqueduct. They pressed themselves against the damp bricks, and saw the great orb’s shadow as it slithered across the street, darkening it in a brief eclipse as the Skull passed directly overhead, before it moved on and the street glowed blue again. At no point did they hear any sound from the titanic craft.

“It’s gone,” Mark whispered.

“We’ll go tell Davina. We won’t step outside for a few days. These things usually only stay in one place several days at a time.”

“Okay,” Mark said meekly.

They ventured out again, kept holding hands. As they walked, Roger explained, “They collect people sometimes because they see us making cities, communities, creating jobs for ourselves, families. They let it go on for so long. And then one day, they want to shake you, shake you badly, to remind you where you are. They allow the other because it makes you almost comfortable. You can’t feel discomfort without comfort. You can’t know pain without pleasure. If they skinned us alive day after day, sooner or later your mind would shut off. You would become a robot, adapt to the pain and endure it. But this way...this way is worse, in the end.”

“You are like my teacher,” Mark teased him, trying to make a joke of it.

“Someone has to be, and keep a rascal like you in check.”

Roger had taken them through a few alleys as shortcuts, and the one they currently squeezed through was barely wide enough to admit him, even having turned his body sideways. The slime on its bricks helped lubricate his passage somewhat. Mark, of course, had an easier time. He had slipped into the alley ahead of him.

A chittering sound behind Roger made him glance back nervously. He saw a silhouette flicker briefly past the mouth of the alley, where they had entered. He hadn’t seen the figure clearly, but it hadn’t struck him as human in outline.

He looked forward again, and saw that Mark had reached the end of the alley. “Wait for me,” he hissed, his palms slapping across the sludge-coated bricks as he advanced. “Mark!”

The boy cleared the alley and entered a bright street ahead. He turned to look back into the passageway. “Come on,” he whispered, extending his hand.

And then, jarringly, as if Mark had dropped through a trapdoor, he was gone. For just the briefest moment Roger thought he saw the boy’s fingers rake across the bricks.

“Mark!” he called more loudly, fighting to shuffle along a little faster. He reached one arm out, clawed at the alley’s entrance, caught it edge and tugged himself clear.

It was a wide street, paved in flagstones, almost a plaza. Sometimes, the Damned even held festivals here, as on the day they judged to be Christmas (though Roger himself would no longer celebrate the birth of the Creator’s son). The Skull hovered there, above the street, one of its unevenly-shaped plates having opened along its sutures and lowered to the flagstones like a hatch or drawbridge. He heard screaming. He saw men and women being dragged up onto the hatch. Into the bone-colored globe.

And he saw Mark. Because he was only a child of eight, it took just one of the greenish tick Demons, scurrying on its hind legs, to restrain him and pull him along. Roger saw ribbons of blood twined around the child’s arms, from where the thing’s sharp pincers bit into him.

“You fucking bastards!” he roared, and began racing after the creature. He saw another one of them close to his right, and at his shout it turned and saw him, too. It whisked forward, chattering, and Roger knew it would catch up to him before he caught up to the one grasping Mark. He spun, ducked under the whooshing sickle of a praying mantis arm, came up and punched the thing in its bony face with its tiny bead-like eyes and blood-slickened mouthparts. He heard its chitin crack, or maybe that was the bones in his own hand, so hard did he strike the thing. It dropped onto its back, and he thought he could hear its feast of gore slosh in its expanded body. But from the ground, the Demon whipped its arms crazily, and Roger found himself dropping, the air going out of him.

Lying on his side, he looked down his body and saw that his right leg had been severed below the knee.

The fallen Demon scrambled to its feet, and used one of these to kick Roger in the arm and face, slashing him deeply across his jaw. It then ran to the aid of one of its fellows, who was having a difficult time hanging onto a large black man.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Roger was chanting, as he propped himself into a sitting position.

He saw Mark – almost at the hatch now – looking back at him as he struggled in his captor’s grip. There were many people wailing and sobbing in the courtyard, but Roger knew his boy’s voice. And he heard Mark call out to him, “Daaaaad!”

5: Apollyon

At first, Iblis Al-Qadim had offered Michael a ride from his palace to the city of Apollyon in a black metal carriage pulled by a team of unclad Damned, the connecting chains hooked right into their flesh, but the Angel had taken one look and refused. Now, instead they rode inside a carriage drawn by two shaggy, prehistoric-looking infernal animals of a type he had heard the Damned often killed and consumed for food.

Dotted across the landscape they traveled through, Michael saw another kind of animal, or was it an animal-like species of Demon? They reminded him of the elephants with impossibly long, thin, multi-jointed legs bearing obelisks on their backs in paintings by Salvador Dali, such as The Temptation of Saint Anthony, except that these would be headless elephants, and their backs were covered in squirming white objects like maggots, which Michael knew were naked human beings, apparently spiked directly to the thick hides of the slowly striding creatures. He could hear the wispy, faraway howling of hundreds of lamenting souls. Mostly the terrain here was barren, featureless, but presently the carriage rattled across a stone bridge spanning a wide river of blood. Distantly, one of the stilt-legged monstrosities waded like a stork through the sluggishly flowing gore to reach the opposite bank.

Were there children pinned to the tops of those behemoths, too?

As they rode on, Michael saw the Demon governor turn his head and gaze out his own window for a while. It gave Michael an opportunity to stare at the way the tentacles of the octopus were not only coiling around his neck, but now burrowing beneath his leathery skin. One tentacle had even snaked into a skull socket, putting out its bright little star of an eye. Michael had noted that the green flames erupting from the top of his head had diminished. He had also noticed that the black octopus Demon’s head had ballooned even more, a green glow showing through the stretched membrane. The miniature bat wings sprouting above its eyes fluttered uselessly.

“Not even human,” Michael heard Iblis Al-Qadim murmur. “Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?”

“Pardon?” Michael spoke up.

Slowly, the terrible lipless visage cranked his way, the remaining eye seeming to have grown dim in its glow as well. The Demon appeared befuddled for a moment. And then, his voice grew strong and assured again, “Nothing, sir. We are nearly there...”

Apollyon’s jagged outlines reared from the bleak landscape. Michael regarded the way a bluish glow rose from the city into the air – its atmosphere of weak fire.

“Do we know where in that big city my son would be?”

“We will need to ask about, sir.”

“Ask? And how long will that take?”

The Demon didn’t answer him. He found this out of character, surprisingly rude, but he didn’t pursue it.

As they approached the fortress-like wall surrounding the city, Michael realized that it was studded with countless human heads, the bodies they were attached to fossilized inside the wall’s concrete. There was scaffolding erected here and there, on which Demon overseers forced Damned laborers to chisel some prisoners free, and seal new prisoners up. Crows perched on a number of squalling heads, plucking at their hair to make their nests. Michael cursed under his breath. He felt strangely ashamed, should any of the heads peer into the carriage and see him there, an Angel resting in its plush interior.

Having passed through the wall’s main gate, the carriage soon came to a stop outside a building with statues of winged baboon-like beasts, in something of an Art Deco style, flanking its riveted iron front doors. They disembarked, Michael and the governor and two of his lesser Demons, and mounted the front steps.

Inside, they were met by a Baphomet, as they were called, another towering breed of high-ranking Demon but with a goat-like head enveloped in a veil of white fire. Iblis Al-Qadim and this thing faced each other, but neither uttered a sound. Michael realized their communication was telepathic, unless they were deciphering meaning in the lapping of their respective flames.

At last, the governor turned to look down at the Angel. “The child is known to be new to this city, and he is known to have been taken in by a printer who lives here.”

“A printer?”

“He and others produce reading materials, for the entertainment of their kind. The materials are potentially inflammatory, but they have been tolerated. For the time being.”

“Take me to him,” Michael said.

*     *     *

When Davina saw the imperial form of Iblis Al-Qadim soaring behind the white-robed Angel, she fell back with an audible gasp. They had come for her lover, she was sure of it – to punish him for smashing the face of that tick Demon...

Michael stepped through the threshold, seeing the terror on a face already wet with tears, and held up his open palms. “Wait...hang on...we aren’t here to hurt you.”

“What do you want?” she managed.

Michael looked around him. It was a tiny sort of parlor, with an even tinier kitchen separated by a half partition. And in the kitchen, tacked to one wall, he spotted drawings. They made his heart lurch, and he moved past the woman to study them closely. Davina watched him but was too stunned to move, wilting in the shadow of that hideous giant with his long staff of office in one fist and the mollusk fixed vampire-like onto his neck.

“He drew these,” Michael said softly, standing in front of the drawings, rendered in rough charcoal. One showed a poorly drawn family, barely stick figures, a man and a woman and a child. But who were the man and woman? “Mark drew these...”

“Mark?” Davina said. “You know Mark?”

Michael faced her. “I’m his father.”

Davina said nothing, her wide eyes staring. Then, a man appeared in the doorway behind her. He clung to its frame, sort of hopping on one leg, because the other was a stump. But at the end of the stump was a vestigial foot, where the lost one was regenerating. The deep wound on his jaw had almost sealed up, as well.

Roger took in the Demon official – hunched forward to fit his height inside the little apartment – and the two skeleton things lurking silently behind him, then addressed Michael. “Who did you say you are?” he demanded in a frayed voice, badly attempting forcefulness.

“My name is Michael Palladino. These things have led me here...they say you’ve taken in my son, Mark.”

“You,” Roger stammered, “you’re...”

“Yes. His father.”

Davina grasped Roger’s arm. “He can get him released, Roger. He can get Mark freed.”

“Freed from where?” Michael said, stepping out of the kitchen, closer to the man and woman.

“He was taken from us...today. A few hours ago. He’s in the Skull, out there.” Roger jerked his head toward the one window in their flat.

Michael went to it, pushed aside a scrap of curtain, looked out. He could see an ivory-hued dome, gleaming above the dark buildings surrounding it. “What am I looking at?”

“It’s a torture plant. A mobile one. It flew into town today...and they kidnapped Mark. Took him inside it.” Roger glared over at the trio of Demons. “Those fucking monsters.”

“Torture plant?” Michael whirled to blaze his eyes at the Demons as well. To Davina, watching him, dark-haired Michael with his goatee and furious face looked as much like a Demon, if not more so. And ironically, her Roger, though damned here, was as blond and blue-eyed as an seraph.

“Yes, sir,” Iblis Al-Qadim replied simply.

Michael lunged forward, to snarl, “They have my son in a fucking torture chamber?”

“This is Hades, sir,” the thing intoned emotionlessly.

The pistol that Michael ripped out of the holster on his belt was a Beretta, of the type he had carried in the Gulf War. He thrust it forward to point up at the Demon’s face. “You son of a bitch! I want you to get my son out of there, right now, do you understand me?”

The octopus’s arms slithered, shifted, and the beating of the wings increased in tempo, but the host creature did not flinch. His zombie-like voice rattled, “I can not do that, sir. It is beyond my power.”

“What do you mean? You’re a Demon...a governor of Demons! You’ll do it or I’ll blow your fucking skull apart, and I know I can kill you...and you know I can kill you.”

“Be that as it may, sir, I can not arrange it. Hades exists because it is the will of the Creator. It is the will of the Creator that those in Hades should suffer. I was able to take you to the place where he is located, but I may not interfere in this process.”

“I’m an Angel, do you hear me? I’m an Angel and you have to do as I say!”

“Even Angels, sir, are bound by the laws of the Creator. The will or desire of all the Angels in Paradise combined could still not sway the Creator from His purposes.”

“You motherfucker!” Michael extended the semiautomatic, which visibly shivered in the air, another inch.

“You can kill me, sir, but it will avail you nothing.”

“I don’t understand you. You’ve helped me to this point.” His eyes switched to meet those of the octopus, appraising him enigmatically.

“We’ll have to wait,” Roger croaked, sagging onto a roughly upholstered chair. “These mobile factories...they only stay a few days. Then they release their prisoners and move on.”

Michael pivoted slowly, his eyes still feral, lowering his handgun somewhat. “Just wait? Just wait for what? My son to endure who knows what kind of agony? Even one day, one hour inside that thing is too much!”

“Do you think I don’t care?” Roger snapped. “That boy is like a son to me.”

“Like a son to you? Well he’s my son, do you understand that? Mine!”

Roger dug his fingers into the arm rests of the chair, and tears filmed his eyes. Through gritted teeth he hissed, “You sanctimonious bastard. Look at you...all dressed in white like a saint. You, living in Heaven with your fountains of wine and your golden toilets while we rot and burn down here. Don’t you feel this? The fire you’re breathing?” He waved one hand through the pale bluish tincture of the air. “This is what we inhale, what licks at our skin, every day. Your son...here...while you tan on some beach in Paradise.”

“Look – I didn’t send my son to Hell. Do you think I’m happy he’s here? I didn’t abandon him. These aren’t my fucking rules...I don’t even understand them!”

“You can’t take him from us,” Roger said, raising his chin defiantly. “You can’t bring him back with you and you know it. So take your pompous anger back to Heaven and leave him here. He’s in good hands.”

“Good hands? He’s in a torture chamber!”

“Yes. As your friend there said, this is Hades. Welcome to it. That poor dear boy is suffering. And I’m in as much torture as he is, just knowing it. But in a few days, he’ll be released. He’ll heal. And we’ll take him back here, and care for him as best we can...as we have been doing.”

“Fuck that.” Michael confronted Iblis Al-Qadim again. “I am not waiting any few days, while my son is torn apart in that thing out there. I want you to do something, you son of a bitch...there has to be something you can do! Put me in there. Put me in his place.”

“Impossible. An Angel, tortured? It could never be...”

“I’m being tortured now!”

The giant Demon half-turned, seemed to sway. Propping himself with his halberd-like staff, he took on that distracted, unfocused aspect again, that Michael had observed in the carriage. “Things are...very confusing at this time. An Angel...wanting to be tortured. An Angel...who I am ordered to deny. My flame...drawn away from me.” The creature staggered before he caught himself again. In a tone that almost sounded hurt, he said, “I am betrayed...”

Michael remembered what he had overheard the Demon mumbling inside the carriage. “Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?” As distantly human in appearance as the governor was, could it truly be that his kind was one of those slated to be eliminated, for being too much like men? Because one particularly human-like Demon race had begun a growing rebellion, a genocide was being waged against other strains the Creator deemed a potential threat. Even this creature’s barely anthropomorphic species, as well? His loyal service, up to now, no longer taken into account? “I am betrayed,” he had just said.

He saw Iblis Al-Qadim go more rigid, regain his composure. But Michael was aware now what was happening. That parasite, affixed to him, was wrestling back the control that had momentarily slipped away from it.

When Iblis Al-Qadim turned his imposing frame in Michael’s direction again, it was to see the Beretta rising.

“Wait!” cried Roger, half-starting up from his chair in alarm and disbelief, even as the room thundered with the enclosed sound of three gunshots in rapid succession.

The projectiles tore through the bulbous, sack-like head of the mollusk being, green-glowing muck splattering out of it. As it collapsed upon itself like a burst balloon, its wings stopped beating and its tentacles came slithering out of the holes they had burrowed into the host Demon’s neck and head. It oozed down his shoulder, hit the floor with a splat like wet leather. Iblis Al-Qadim stood oddly naked, swayed again. Then, he tottered back, fell against the wall behind him, and slid into a broken pile of insect-like skeletal limbs.

“I am...freed,” he rasped.

“Now – free my son,” Michael told the Demon.

The crumpled entity gazed up at the Angel with his remaining eye glinting inside that pit of a socket. For several moments, Michael felt hypnotized, as when the globe-headed Demon had rummaged inside his brain. And then, he and the others in the room heard a booming thud from outside, in the city. It rattled the one window in its frame and sent a vibration up their legs through their soles.

“What’s happened?” Davina asked.

“I have...contacted the Skull,” Iblis Al-Qadim said. “I have brought it down for you, sir.”

Michael swept to the window again, looked out. He could only see a bare crescent, the very top, of the vast bone sphere this time. It had lowered, crashed, all the way to the street.

When he looked back at the Demon, he saw that both eyes were black and empty now, and no more emerald fire flickered inside the miter atop his head.

Michael then faced the two lesser skeleton Demons, lingering by the door to the flat. He was prepared to raise his gun and aim it at them if they surged forward, but they did not move, as if they awaited instructions from a new commander.

“I need more guns,” he told them.

6: Tortures

While the two creatures were off on their errand to the Demonic station where Iblis Al-Qadim had consulted with the Baphomet, Michael and Roger wrapped the dead governor’s surprisingly light scarecrow of a corpse – and that of his parasite – in several blankets for the departed underlings to take away with them, later.

They returned promptly. Though Demons generally preferred swords and other such primitive weapons to firearms, they used them occasionally or stocked them for the use of vacationing Angels anxious to do a little hunting of the Damned. Thus, the two Demons came back with their bony arms laden. There was a knapsack heavy with various types of ammunition. Michael had asked for an M16 with a grenade launcher beneath the barrel, but he had to make do without the grenade launcher. Before the silent pair had left, Michael had asked Roger, “What kind of guns are you familiar with, if any?”

“Why?” Davina had spoken up.

“I can go alone,” Michael said, his eyes remaining on Roger. “But I thought you might want to come with me.”

“You’re an Angel,” Davina said. “They can’t do much to you. But Roger is Damned. If they catch him, they could lock him into one horrible torture for centuries.”

Ignoring her comment, Roger replied evenly, “I was a soldier...killed in what I’m told you people now call the first World War.”

Michael smiled. It was the first time Roger had seen the expression on him. “I was in the Gulf War.”

“The what war?”

Michael snorted. “I’ll tell you another time. So...a simpler gun for you, huh? I recommend a shotgun; very good for close combat.”

Combat, Roger’s mind echoed, with a quaver.

“Roger, please, please don’t.” Davina held onto his arm. “They’ve already taken my child...I can’t lose you, too!”

“He’s my child,” Michael spoke up. “Mark is my son – just so you know.”

Davina flashed her eyes onto him, blacker than twin gun muzzles. “He’s as much our son as he ever was yours.”

“Listen...” Michael began.

“I would prefer a .303 Enfield,” Roger broke in. “But a shotgun would do.”

Michael again showed Roger that little smile, then turned to instruct the Demons.

And so, it was a 12-gauge pump-action Ithaca that the Angel took from one of the Demons and passed into Roger’s hands. He was seated as he examined it, but his severed leg had already almost fully reconstituted. “I suppose I expected a break-open style shotgun.”

Michael reclaimed the weapon, showed him how to work the slide, and fed a series of shells into it before he handed it back. “You just stick close to me. I’m hoping they’ll be too afraid to oppose an Angel. But...they may have the attitude of that octopus thing, and think this isn’t for us to interfere in. And then they may try to stop us.”

Roger rose from the chair, and looked past the Angel at Davina. “I can’t bear the thought of it either, my love. Our dear boy inside that thing. In their hands...”

Her lower lip was trembling badly and she turned to face the wall, arms tightly crossed as if to hug and console herself, but said nothing more. And a moment later, she gave a little nod.

“Hey. Can you really do this?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” Roger said without hesitation, sounding a bit insulted, but Michael persisted.

“It’s been a long time for you.”

Roger held his stare, took in a long breath. “There was a German soldier...maybe ten years younger than I. We found ourselves face-to-face. His Mauser was covered in mud; had jammed. My Lee-Endfield had run empty. But I still had my bayonet, and he did not. As he tried to clear the round, I sort of thrust the rifle at him without aiming. The bayonet went into him directly under his right eye. It forced the eye out, onto his cheek. The blade slid out and he sort of turned away, stunned...and began shrieking. My German isn’t very good, but I know the word ‘Mutter’. He just staggered off holding his face, crying that word again and again like a child. Which he was, really.”

“And what did you do?”

“I walked after him...and I stabbed him in the back. He fell, and I stabbed him again. And the crying stopped.”

“Yes,” Michael said, nodding. “But – did you kill him then because you hated him, or because you pitied him?”

Roger flicked his eyes away, and to Michael that was enough to answer the question. The story, meant to illustrate his toughness, had betrayed his compassion – simply in the fact that he recalled it so vividly at all. But he muttered, “These things aren’t men. They don’t even have mothers.” He thought of the way his Davina had been used. “Not really...”

“Yeah. But they have a Father,” Michael said. “And I could care less.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the other man. “So – are you ready to get our boy back?”

The British man met the American’s stare again, startled by his phrasing.

“Let’s go,” Roger said.

*     *     *

As they started off down the street, Roger and Michael glanced back to see the two skeleton beings carrying out the mummy-wrapped package of their fallen leader, to load upon the animal-drawn metal carriage. Roger felt relief that the things were not remaining with Davina, while Michael felt a funny twinge of regret. Had the Demon helped him out of sympathy, or merely out of spite for his Father? Either way, the Demon had been judged to be too human-like...and in doing so, his Creator had only proved Himself right, by pushing the creature into a human-like act of vengeance.

It wouldn’t have been unusual for an Angel to be seen walking along the streets of a city in Hell carrying an assault rifle in his hands, but to see a Damned man striding beside him (with a faint limp) openly carrying a pump-action shotgun would be quite the shock – had there been anyone on the street to witness it. The citizens were still keeping themselves out of sight, though the Skull’s crew seemed to have taken aboard all the prisoners they intended to. But Roger glimpsed a figure ducking behind the edge of a second floor window, and realized he was at least being peeked at around makeshift window shades, and through cracked doors, by his bewildered neighbors – perhaps alarmed by his actions, perhaps stirred.

“That brand on your forehead,” Michael said. “It stands for your sin...”

“Atheist,” Roger stated.

“And your wife...uh, girlfriend. H?”

“H is for Hinduism.”

“Does Mark have one on his head?”

“Yes. A U – unbaptized.”

Michael made a hissing sound. “His mother – my first wife – wouldn’t allow it. I could shoot myself for listening to her. Not that it would kill me, now. It’s my fault...my fault, for giving in.”

“As you said, we don’t make the bloody laws. You mustn’t blame her. Or yourself. It isn’t his father’s fault...it’s his Father’s fault.” Roger nodded his head upward, as if at something hovering unseen above them. “Anyway...if it’s anyone’s fault that Mark is inside that place now, it’s mine. I didn’t protect him well enough. I shouldn’t have let him go into that alley ahead of me. I should have said we’d stay in the alley for an hour or so, until the Skull’s crew had finished rounding up their prey.”

Michael looked over at him as they strode side-by-side. “Now it’s you who’s talking shit...because it seems to me, you and your lady back there have been doing a very good job of looking after him. Thank you.”

“Guilt,” Roger mused aloud. “Yours. Mine. His. He torments himself, you know, over what happened to you and your second wife. The fire he caused.”

“He torments himself,” Michael repeated, making a wincing expression. “I’ve got to reassure him. I have to show him that Dawn and I still love him – could never blame him for that.” After several more steps he said, “When we first got to Heaven, I guess my wife and I were...humbled. We tried to accept our fates, our Father’s judgment...to trust in the system. We settled in a town called Nepenthe. I chose it because it has features that reminded me of places Mark loved. A park, with trees. A mall. Huh. Heaven’s full of shopping malls. Anyway...it wasn’t any solace. It only made my loss sharper, until I couldn’t take it any longer. How can they call it a Paradise, when I’m grieving every day because my only child is trapped in Hell? How can I call that place my home for eternity, without him?”

They turned a street corner, and found themselves at the end of that long, wide avenue as open as a plaza. At its other end, the huge bone orb rested in a little crater of shattered flagstones. In dropping, it had even caved in the front of a brick building facing onto the plaza. Not only had Iblis Al-Qadim prompted it to land, somehow, but that hinged skull-plate had lowered open, a hatchway. Steam was billowing out from inside. How long before those aboard the craft were able to override the mental command the governor had given, or repair whatever damage he might have caused? Might the craft be borne aloft again at any minute?

Michael tossed Roger a glance again, and the British soldier looked blanched, the shotgun drooping heavily in his hands. But the man’s wounded stride didn’t waver, and Michael felt an odd affection suffuse him. Who was he to question his resolve, or abilities? He had obviously killed more men than himself in battle, in a war more earth-shaking than his own, which Michael was a bit crestfallen to know Roger wasn’t even familiar with. The affection Michael experienced was like that he had felt for other warriors, walking beside him many years ago. Like the affection he might have felt for a brother.

Together, they reached the lip of the hatchway...together, walked up through the steam’s obscuring clouds.

7: Unholy War

Just inside the shell of the Skull, the two humans encountered three Kilcrops bent over a series of valves, one of which was leaking steam around its edges and another dripping a greenish fluid. At the sight of the men with guns, they froze with their hands on the great valves’ wheels. One of them held a large wrench, but didn’t raise it as a weapon. Despite their surprise and paralysis, the naked creatures – bony and sunken-faced as starving children – suppressed cackles and giggled behind their fixed grins.

The men moved past them carefully, and left them behind in the steam. Michael said, “Maybe I should’ve killed them so they wouldn’t raise an alarm. But the gunshots would’ve done the same...”

Their path branched off into different directions immediately. Narrow corridors, some with walls of metal but one with walls apparently carved or grown from the same bone substance as the craft’s exterior. A metal ramp rose toward a higher level over there, but over here was a flight of metal steps, and then they saw a metal spiral staircase in the distance, in the light from a caged gas jet in the wall. Roger was about to ask which way they should choose, when they both heard an echoing, haunting cry. It was a woman screaming, apparently off down that bone corridor. They headed that way.

They moved through a mist not so much of steam, now, as incense. Whereas in the more mechanical sections of the Skull bluish gas jets burned along the walls, in the long bone corridor there were organic-looking sockets or hollows in the wall in which burned candles or the incense they smelled. As they proceeded, they heard more reverberating banshee shrieks, from both men and women. So far, none of the cries sounded like the voices of children.

Toward the end of the bone corridor there were two rounded doorways on either side, facing each other. Michael and Roger exchanged looks, then Michael swung into the threshold on the right while Roger did the same on the left.

Michael saw three white Xs floating in the murk of a smallish room. They were the spread-eagled nude bodies of three women, their wrists and ankles shackled to a trio of metal hoops hanging on chains, the ends of which were lost in the darkness of a surprisingly high shaft. When they saw the Angel, they whimpered and sobbed, no doubt thinking he was here to enjoy their torments along with their Demon captors. Their weeping alerted a grotesque tick-like creature, the likes of which Michael hadn’t seen before, bent over a table spread with gleaming metal instruments that it didn’t even seem to require, since its various pairs of arms looked sufficient for any torture it might devise. The entity whipped around, and just from the way it raised its bladed forearms – and from the way its nearly translucent belly was a bottle filled with blood, and the way the three women dribbled blood from various puncture wounds on their bellies and thighs – Michael decided to pull his trigger, and the M16 was set to fully automatic, and the stream of lead caused hunks of chitin to spring into the air like shattered pottery. He drove the tick against its counter of tools, which spilled over it as it fell dead...blood gushing from the broken bottle.

Understanding now that the Angel was not here to partake of their punishments, the women began babbling at him, pleading to be unshackled. “Just shoot through my wrists and ankles,” one woman begged, wild-eyed, “I’ll heal...it’s okay...shoot me down, please!”

Her request stunned him, until he was shaken by the sound of a shotgun blast, and he spun toward the doorway. “I’m sorry – forgive me,” he mumbled too softly for the women to hear.

In the opposite room, Roger had found an elderly man lashed down onto an iron bed frame. The man’s decapitated head had been placed on a shelf several feet away, but rubber hoses and segmented metal cables had been inserted into the stump of its neck, connecting the head to the trunk. The head’s eyes streamed tears as the old man watched two ticks that had bent over him, one with a tubular proboscis plunged into his thigh and the other snipping off his fingers with one of its pincer limbs.

Despite the horrors he had been witness to – and himself suffered – over the decades, Roger was dazed by what he saw. It was Michael’s gunfire that shook him out of his stupor, and even as the two ticks jerked upright at the sound, Roger fired at the one on the right with his shotgun. The weapon jolted in his arms, but the tick jolted even more – exploded across the wall behind it like a water balloon full of gore. The one on the left flew at him, arms spinning, so fast that he barely had time to swing the gun in its direction. He stabbed the thing with the barrel as if there were a bayonet at its end. The blow was only enough to make the Demon stagger back a little, but it gave Roger time to pull the trigger again, and the point-blank eruption of fire and OO buckshot obliterated the top half of the monster.

Roger whirled with the shotgun leveled as he heard a third presence behind him, but he was able to restrain himself from shooting when he saw that it was Michael. “Come on,” Michael, the seemingly older of the two men, directed him, and they stepped back into the corridor and emerged from its end. Roger heard the old man’s severed head calling after him.

The next hallway was wider, running transverse to the one they had just exited, and they entered at its midpoint. From its high ceiling, metal cocoons hung in two rows of a half dozen. They were like iron maidens, and both men wondered if there might even be spikes inside them, or if these were merely holding vessels until their human contents could be properly tortured later on. The cocoons dangled and swayed like a strange crop of fruit, emitting a chorus of sobs and pleas. The two men passed under them, toward another doorway at the right hand end of the hallway.

The left hand end of the hall was nothing but a mass of twisting steam, and the men pivoted around when they heard a clatter of armored feet and the chitter of inhuman voices within its depths. Then, they were bursting out of it: three smaller ticks, not yet gorged and slowed with feasted blood, so swift that even though both men fired upon them simultaneously, the sound of their combined thunder deafening, they only just barely cut the things down before they reached them. The last of the creatures skidded to a stop at Roger’s feet, causing an array of spent 5.56mm and shotgun shells to scatter. Now the air was misted with gun smoke in addition to the steam and incense.

“Who are you?” a voice called from one of the cocoons above. “Are you rebels?”

“We’re looking for a boy!” Roger shouted, not sure which of the containers the man’s voice issued from. “Eight years old...”

“Not that way!” the voice yelled down, meaning the right hand path they had chosen. “The other way – into the steam. There were children in these things just like twenty minutes ago, but the bugs switched our places.”

“Why?”

The unseen speaker seemed to hesitate. “It’s their turn.”

Michael snatched Roger by the arm. “Thanks!” he called.

“Just kill these fuckers!” the disembodied voice replied.

They plunged into the hot steam, apparently originating from a ruptured pipe above them, and could see nothing for several moments except for three evenly-spaced, orange-glowing smudges along their right side. When Michael got close to them, he discerned three tanks set into the wall, containing a luminous orange fluid in which three human faces – flayed from their skulls – were suspended on wires. Though the staring eyes did not follow him and the slack mouths had no muscles to move them, he knew there was a living consciousness in each of the masks. The bodies they had been sliced from had been incinerated, so when these scraps of flesh were eventually freed they would regenerate into their complete human forms again.

Regarding the faces as they regarded him, Michael was momentarily transfixed with horror, and not for the first time felt a vague kind of shame for being an Angel. But mostly, he was just grateful that he didn’t recognize any of the faces; none was that of a child. Tearing himself away, he left the apparitions behind him.

Roger was the first to emerge from the steam, and as he did so heard a whoosh, a curved sword missing his neck by two inches as it cleaved the air. It was a blue-skinned Apsara, her eyes and tusks gleaming. She reminded him uncomfortably of his Davina: the sensual curves of her nearly naked body, her general facial features, the large eyes and heavy brows and thick black hair, the Demon’s swimming in the air as if each strand had its own independent life. He hesitated for only an instant, but that was too long for Michael, who let loose with his M16. With just a grunt, as if punched in the stomach, the female Demon was slammed backwards into a wall. She left smears of red on it as she sank, her animated hair falling in lifeless curtains to obscure her face.

Michael spotted another Apsara hovering in a doorway, a spear in her fists, but either his gun or the fact that he was an Angel caused her to duck back out of sight before he could swing the rifle her way. Roger approached the open threshold and peeked in, wary of the succubus, but he obviously didn’t see anything encouraging, since he waved for Michael to continue onwards.

The hallway dead-ended in a high curved wall. The two men realized they had reached the opposite side of the Skull, but a spiral staircase with steps that clanged under their boots took them up to a metal catwalk. They crossed this, back into the fog of escaping steam, feeling their way along by holding onto the catwalk’s railing.

Behind them, they heard more feet clanging on the steps of the spiral staircase. These new feet struck the metal with a lighter but sharper sound. In only seconds, there were many of these ringing footfalls...accompanied by the rustling sound of multiple bodies scraping against each other, and a chorus of whispering, chittering voices...

Michael and Roger began to run, guessing what sort of creature was swarming behind them...but as they cleared the churning cloud of steam, they saw more of the tick Demons ahead of them, a small horde, razored arms spread into waiting embraces.

Michael skidded to a halt and spun around, opened fire at their pursuers as the first of them sprang out of the wall of steam. “Get through them!” he roared at Roger. “Clear our way!”

Back-to-back, the two men fired their weapons repeatedly, Roger bucking with the explosions from the shotgun, Michael emptying a magazine of his clattering assault rifle and deftly slapping in another.

Two of the ticks went down under one of Roger’s blasts, the OO buckshot having dispersed into a spray of heavy slugs. Another discharge sent one of the arachnid beings up over the railing, but a barb on its foot caught in the mesh of the handrail and it swung from the catwalk lifelessly, blood raining like candy from a burst pinata. Three last ticks leapt over the bodies of their fallen brothers. Roger fired, hit one of them, and then the other two were only a few feet away. A whipping claw struck the end of his barrel just as Roger jerked the trigger again, causing the shot to go wild. He followed through with the momentum of the Demon’s blow, however, and with all his force swung the wooden stock of the weapon into the thing’s plated little face. The cracking impact sent it reeling, its back striking the handrail.

Roger jumped back as the remaining tick took a swipe at him. He blocked a second blow with his shotgun. But the entity had multiple pairs of arms, and Roger felt one of them get under the shotgun, stab into his body and rip upwards. He grunted, fell onto his back on the hard catwalk surface.

Looking down at himself, he saw blood welling out of him...saw that he had been rent deeply.

He tried to angle the shotgun to point up at the thing, but it kicked the gun and its clawed foot not only sent the weapon out of his hands but nearly severed one of his fingers. It hovered above him, its arms spinning and clacking as if in a mad sign language, wordlessly speaking in tongues. The sight of his pumping gore seemed to tantalize the creature. It sank down over him, appeared to stare into his eyes a moment, and dropped its head as if to fellate him. Roger felt another deep stab, as the tick shot its proboscis into his inner thigh...heard a terrible gurgling sound as his blood was sucked up into the vampire.

Wheezing in pain but steeling himself, Roger slipped his injured hand into his shirt. And deeper than that. It burrowed under the lip of his wound.

Either Roger’s motions or another metallic rattle from the Angel’s M16 broke its lustful spell, but the arachnid jumped to its feet, the bloody proboscis withdrawing. It saw Roger rummaging inside his soaked shirt and descended upon him, lashing out with a mantis arm. Roger rolled to one side and the claw banged against the catwalk. The creature lifted its head and chattered, its mouthparts twitching like bloodied fingers. Roger had rolled onto his back again, and he was tearing something out of his chest. It looked like an organ, red and drooling strings of blood. He had known just where to find it. The hunk of metal had been a nagging weight inside him, an irritation and a burden – a pain now extracted, liberated, and returned to those who had inflicted it upon him.

Screaming in a mix of agony and war cry, Roger tugged back the little .25's slide, aimed it up at the tick and squeezed off round after round. The semi-automatic’s immersion in his body had not dampened its gunpowder. The bullets were small, but they drove the tick back, shrieking. He emptied the pistol. The very last slug sent his attacker flipping backwards over the railing. He heard it crash far below.

Michael had emptied his fresh magazine and popped in yet another, mostly firing blindly into the steam. But soon, he saw only a heap of demolished bodies at the edge of the mist, one or two badly wounded Demons screeching, the ingested blood of their victims streaming through the holes in the catwalk’s floor.

He turned back toward Roger to see that he had gone down. A last tick was moving in on him, its cracked face oozing its own greenish ichor. He saw that Roger was without the shotgun, gripped only a toy-sized pistol that had apparently run dry. Michael sprayed the wounded Demon before it could get to him, white fire flashing from the M16's muzzle, the impact launching the vampire off its feet. He then rushed forward to Roger’s side. When he took his arm to help him up, the British soldier let out a terrible groan, and that was when Michael saw how the front of his shirt was saturated with blood.

“Can you make it?” he asked numbly.

“Listen!” Roger hissed, clinging to the man’s arm so as to hold himself up, staining the Angel’s robes.

From beyond the end of the catwalk, they both heard crying voices. Watery with echoes, distant and ghostly...but distinctly, the cries of children.

“Come on,” Michael said, slinging his M16 over his own shoulder and retrieving the shotgun from the floor. He put one arm around the Damned soul. Roger kept his left hand pressed to his chest as if to hold his split body together. Every step made him wince, every other step a stagger that almost toppled both of them. They made it through the bodies of the Demons Roger had killed, loped like a wounded four-legged animal until they could make out a polished door of bone set almost seamlessly into a wall of bone, at the end of the bridge-like catwalk.

8: Avenging Angel

The wall, when they reached it, was made up of plates separated by rippled sutures, like the outside of the Skull itself. Roger leaned against it while Michael took hold of the door’s latch. It was not hinged, but slid along grooved track into the wall.

In the room beyond, Michael saw three Kilcrops hunkering near the foot of a row of coffin-like containers – metal, rusted and riveted – bolted horizontally into the floor. There was a hatch in each one, the hatches currently hanging open, where the faces of those inside the sarcophagi would be. It was from these open hatches that the wailing voices came. One child was sobbing hysterically, another crying for her mother, but Michael couldn’t tell if any of the cries belonged to his son.

There was a hose with a nozzle at its end hanging from the ceiling, over the coffins, and its base end was connected to a huge glass orb in the center of the room. This orb was filled with a yellowish solution, and inside the miniature yellow sea writhed a colony of white worm-like eels or eel-like worms. Their threaded bodies almost formed one immense living ball inside the globe. Following the line of the suspended black rubber hose again, Michael could guess its use: for delivering the contents of the orb into the dozen metal coffins. They were water-tight, then. And he had no doubt the worms were ravenous.

Though the snickering Kilcrops didn’t try to attack or flee, having heard the approaching gunfire and thus waiting to see what the two men intended, Michael treated one of them to the contents of a 12-gauge shell. When the gaunt body had stopped flopping and rolling across the floor, the other two began to giggle more wildly in nervousness, one clutching at the arms of the other. Michael jerked his gun barrel at their grinning faces. “If you don’t want to end up like your friend, open those things up now.”

One Kilcrop dashed to the far end of the row, the other to the nearer. They reached to a clasp system on each, and the lids of the sarcophagi began to swing open. An adolescent black girl crawled out of one like a spider, fell to the floor. Roger managed to help her up while still pressing his chest. She started to flee from the room in a panic, her eyes crazed, but Roger held her at the elbow and croaked, “Stay with us, dear...we’ll all go out together.”

Michael almost wanted to push past the emerging children to get a better look as the pair of Kilcrops converged at the center to unlock the last two chrysalises.

From one of these, Mark rose into view. His eyes flicked from the robed Angel quickly to Roger. Michael saw recognition dawn on Mark’s face then, and it was a piercing realization – that his son had recognized his surrogate parent, but not him. The boy hadn’t expected to see his father come to this place to rescue him. When Mark spotted Roger, a grin opened in his tear-crusted face. “Dad!” he cried, clambering down from his cocoon. He darted to the man but came short of hugging him, seeing how badly he was injured. Roger smiled, and released the traumatized girl to slip one arm around Mark’s shoulders.

Tears flooded Roger’s eyes. Tears of love, and relief...and pain. Twice now, the boy had called him “Dad”. But he felt that when Mark finally turned around and saw who it was that had accompanied him here, the child he thought of as his son would never call him by that name again.

Only when his arms were slipped around Roger did Mark glance at Michael a second time – Michael, who stood momentarily wordless, helpless as if paralyzed. At last, the boy understood who he was seeing. “Dad?” he said. There was a leeriness in his tone, mixed with disbelief and delight. This obvious confusion of feeling pierced Michael again. He could tell the boy was a little frightened of him. The gun in his hands, the blood splashed across his robes. He was still afraid his father was angry at him for causing his and Dawn’s deaths.

“Mark,” Michael said, his own eyes wet and agleam. “I came for you.”

“Daddy,” his son whimpered, face crumpling, regressing into an even younger child.

“Go to him,” Roger whispered, and kissed the top of the boy’s head before releasing him.

Mark took a timid step forward, and Michael closed the distance – swept him into the curve of his free arm, clenched him against his body.

“I thought you hated me,” Mark sobbed.

“I love you,” Michael told his son. “I love you, forever...”

Blinking at his tears, Roger glanced around at the faces of the eleven other children, ranging in age and race but all of them ragged, all of them waiting for the adults to give them some sort of guidance. “Children,” he told them, “you stay with us.”

“Come on – we’re out of here,” Michael said, moving back toward the doorway, his arm still around his son’s shoulders. “Roger...can you walk?”

“We’ll help him,” said another boy, and he and the shivering black girl took Roger under both his arms.

Out through the bone wall, across the catwalk littered with cracked and draining tick bodies, one or two with a limb still twitching. Down the spiral staircase. Michael had the shotgun in his hand, at the ready should one of the bodies spring up alive, but none did. He had passed his Beretta to Roger, easier to manage in his condition. Through the steam-filled corridor into which the three flayed faces stared, the children held hands in a chain. Michael saw a Kilcrops dart across the end of the corridor, but didn’t fire at it.

Under the dozen hanging cocoons. “Is that you?” the familiar voice called down. “Did you find him? Hello? How about us, huh? Please? Hello? Hey!”

“Can’t save them all. Not every soul in Hell,” Roger whispered into the ear of the tall black girl, “can we, my love?”

Down the bone corridor. Suddenly, candles and burning incense sticks spilled out of several of the organic-looking sockets in the walls and two ticks emerged, dropped into the hallway, charged with flailing jagged limbs...but before they could pick up speed Michael had let go of Mark and leveled the shotgun, and Roger had pushed the black girl behind him and pointed the Beretta. The children flinched and covered their ears, but it only took a few short bursts from both men to bring the ticks down, and a few moments later the party was advancing again.

The entrance to the Skull was near. Here was where corridors, ramps, doorways branched into numerous directions. And as the party moved toward the main entrance, scores of ticks flowed out of these hallways and thresholds as if coordinated by a silent command, scampered down the clanging metal ramp, descended a ladder fixed to the wall. In just seconds, the humans’ path was blocked by what looked like a hundred of the greenish creatures. They gave off an insidiously low chittering, but it quickly rose into a metallic buzz-saw sound. Again, the children clamped their hands over their ears. “Dad!” Mark cried.

Michael looked back the way they had come. He saw the light going out in the bone corridor as more and more candles were knocked out of their hollows by ticks emerging through the walls. Soon, the corridor would go completely black, masking the advancing rear army.

“Here,” Michael said, passing Roger the shotgun. He saw Roger stand as straight and steady as he could so as to accept the weapon. In turn, Roger handed the Beretta to the black girl, the oldest child. Her eyes were still wide and half-frenzied, but she accepted the pistol. Michael took his M16 off his shoulder and leveled it grimly. “Roger...will they dare to stop me?”

“These things? I think they will. They may not hurt you, but they’ll disarm you. Incapacitate you, until they recapture the rest of us. Until they can repair this machine. Then they’ll let you go...and they’ll fly this thing so far away you might never find it again.”

“I’m not going to let that happen. They’ll have to hurt me.” Michael took a step forward. He saw the ticks at the fore of the group shift back ever-so-slightly, either the gun in his hands or the look in his eyes filling even their robotic minds with fear. He took a second step.

From the left, then the right, two Apsaras appeared. A third, and a fourth. One held a curved sword, and the others carried metal spears. Their movements as eerily graceful as stylized dance steps, their forms beautiful in a nightmarish way, they positioned themselves at the front of the mass of ticks. At first Michael expected them to lead the battalion forward...but they extended their spears at waist-level and turned their nearly nude bodies slowly, using the weapons to urge back the teeming arachnid warriors. The creatures seemed reluctant, but complied. Michael realized what the human-like Apsaras were doing: parting the ticks, opening a path for him – the Angel.

He glanced back over his shoulder. There was just enough guttering candle glow left in the bone corridor for him to see another of the blue-fleshed succubi standing with her arms spread, a sword in each fist, her hair lapping the air. Ticks fidgeted restlessly behind her, but none tried to push around the fearsome Demon.

Facing forwards again, Michael slowly advanced. The children followed meekly, Mark holding onto his father’s robe. His chest wound healing even as he staggered along, Roger kept the shotgun ready...but none of the divided assembly of ticks surged around the Apsaras and the weapons they had used as if to create invisible barriers. Michael entered this living corridor first, expecting it to close around him at any second. It didn’t. He glared defiantly into the ranked, expressionless faces as he passed them.

He turned and guarded the entrance to the Skull as the children cleared the gauntlet, ducked out the doorway and sprinted down the ramp into the city of Apollyon. Its burning blue air had never seemed inviting to them until this moment. He saw them scatter in all directions. The black girl had his Beretta still in her fist but he didn’t call her back. A rebel in the making, maybe. She could not grow up, but she could mature, harden...like a stone sharpened into a spear head.

At last, only Michael, Roger and Mark stood in the doorway, looking back into the Skull – meeting the gaze of all those glittering black eyes, and the more human eyes of the Apsaras.

“I’m immortal,” Michael said to the Demons, like troops gathered for his inspection. “You’re not. If you ever touch my boy again...if you ever go near him, or try to take revenge on this man,” he nodded toward Roger, “I’ll spend eternity killing every last one of you motherfuckers.”

And with that, the two bloody men and the boy between them stepped wearily out of the Skull.

9: The Family

The child slept on the little sofa they had purchased from a shop in the city, where the Damned manufactured crude furniture, and he was covered under a quilt Davina herself had sewn together from scraps of cloth she’d collected. She sat on the very edge of the sofa, lightly caressing his forehead, her brown fingers trailing over the raised U branded there...a wound his body hadn’t been allowed to regenerate. She had told him it stood for “Unbelievably Cute”.

Roger sat in a chair opposite, shirtless. The groove in his chest was raw pink with puckered edges, but no longer an entrance to his interior. He watched his lover’s face, the way her uncanny huge eyes glistened. Still weak, he used the chair’s arms to push himself to his feet, crossed to her, took her head against his chest and stroked her thick hair. He heard her sniffle, felt her kiss his healing scar.

“He won’t really stay, will he? He says that now...but don’t you think he’ll change his mind?”

Roger knew the man better than she. “No, my love. I think he means it.”

“But he won’t be allowed to, will he? Aren’t they told how much time they can spend here? Isn’t there a limit?”

“I don’t believe there is. I think he can stay here as long as he wants. Forever, if he likes.”

“But his wife won’t want to, I’m sure.”

“Yes, that’s the only thing. She isn’t the boy’s natural mother.” He regretted the words the moment he said them. Davina’s head lifted, as he knew it would.

“Neither am I, his natural mother. But she may love him enough to remain here, too...do you think?”

“I don’t know her, my dear. We haven’t met her. We can’t say.”

“I hope she doesn’t love him as I do.” Davina looked down at the boy again.

“That isn’t a good thing to wish, Davina.”

“But do you want to let him go? After all you went through to get him back?”

“I went through that to take him from the hands of Demons, who meant to torture him. But these are the hands of his father...who loves him enough to leave behind the Paradise most of us down here will yearn for, forever.”

“I don’t begrudge him,” Davina moaned. “How can I hate the man my son loves? And I thank him, for what he did. But I only wish...I only wish he would go home. Just come back to visit from time to time.”

“I know, love.” His hand slid down and inside her veil of hair to stroke her wet cheek. “I feel the same way. We just have to wait, and see...”

*     *     *

After his experience inside the Skull, Michael and Dawn would not enter into the administrative building of the Demons, with its Art Deco winged baboons flanking the front steps, until a carriage arrived in Apollyon bearing an Angel accompanied by two Celestials – an androgynous heavenly race, almost ghost-like in their silence and with their empty stares, but wearing all-too-solid swords in scabbards.

The Angel had been a priest in life, so in the afterlife had been given a position of some authority. When he and his guardians stepped down from the carriage and the couple moved forward to meet him, he pushed back the hood of his white robe and beamed a smile, extending his hand. Michael felt a kind of disgust for him already. Weren’t the Demons better, in a way? They didn’t hide their hatred for the Damned behind bright grins. Well, except for the Kilcrops...

“So nice to meet you,” the man said, next pressing Dawn’s hand between his two. “I’m Reverend Worthy.” In life he had been called Father Worthy, but in Heaven there could only be the one great Father. “Shall we go inside to talk?”

Finally, Michael consented to enter the building that he hadn’t been in since Iblis Al-Qadim had taken him here to consult the goat-headed Baphomet. He saw that entity watching them from across the foyer as Worthy led them to a doorway. A corridor beyond, but no Demons waiting to ambush him, no ticks springing from holes in the walls to slash at him. They entered a small office, where Worthy seated himself behind a black marble desk. The Palladinos sat in front of it.

“So...” began Reverend Worthy.

“So,” cut in Michael, “my son...Mark. I’d like to take him back to Heaven with me.”

The former priest’s smile rippled at the corners. “Ohhh, Mr. Palladino...I’m so sorry, but that is utterly out of the question. It’s impossible – just not allowed.”

“Maybe because no one has persisted before. Maybe the Creator could make an exception.”

“You must know...many people have persisted before. But the Creator can make no exceptions; it would be against the very reason that Hades, and more importantly Heaven, exist. But I am truly so sorry.” He spread his hands, which Michael had found too soft and puffy.

He saw Dawn look over at him, as he lowered his head and nodded. “I understand. I didn’t expect you to say yes...but I had to ask, anyway.” He didn’t add that he had promised his wife he would try. That it had been her idea to ask. But he was actually relieved, in a way, by the Angel’s words. How could he think to take his son into Paradise, away from the two people in Hades who adored him? Could all the replica Disney theme parks and replica McDonald’s burger stops and glittering shopping malls in Heaven replace those two Damned souls?

“Well,” Reverend Worthy said, “I’m told you were considering remaining in Hades, then.”

“Yes.” Michael raised his head, but was afraid to meet the eyes of the woman seated beside him. “It’s my choice to do so.”

“It’s...something you are allowed to do. But do you know how very awful it is in this place?”

“I believe that’s been well illustrated for me,” Michael said ominously.

“Yes...of course. Well, as I say, it is permissible. An uncommon request, but not without precedent. And you...Mrs. Palladino?”

At last, Michael summoned the strength to look over at her, but now it was she who lowered her head and murmured, “I won’t be staying.”

The former priest nodded slowly, looking suitably pained by their dilemma. “I see. But you know you can visit your husband here any time you wish...and he can visit you, without his son, as often as he likes.”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Will you be returning with me, then, to the palace?” It was the palace where the governor Iblis Al-Qadim had resided, also housing the portal through which these Angels had entered into Hades.

“Yes, Reverend. I just...I just need to talk to my husband alone, first.”

“Of course, of course.” Worthy floated to his feet, out from behind the desk. Michael hated the perfumed proximity of him. “I will leave you two alone to talk for as long as you wish. In the meantime I will be speaking with the Baphomet, Mr. Palladino...to instruct him that you are not to be interfered with.”

“And my son. And those two Damned.”

“I can not guarantee that any Damned soul will not be punished...all I can guarantee is that you will not be opposed, if you step in to protect them.”

“However you want to phrase it,” Michael said darkly.

“A devoted parent, to be sure. You are to be admired.”

“If only the Father of all children were as devoted...eh, Reverend?”

“Michael,” Dawn whispered.

The former priest’s smile faltered more than before. “I know your pain makes you...unaware of what you say, Mr. Palladino.”

“I am only too aware of what I say. And maybe now you think Hades is the place I should have been sent to all along.”

“I would not think that. The Father, in His great love for you, judged that you should be in Paradise.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint Him, in not wanting to be there any longer. Then again...He’s been a disappointment to me, too.”

For several moments Reverend Worthy looked horrified, as if afraid to be consumed along with Michael should a lightning bolt crash through the ceiling just then. But there was no sign at all that the Creator was even in attendance, and now it was Michael who reached to shake hands, squeezing the other man’s filmy silk handkerchief of a hand in his own firm grip.

“Goodbye, Reverend.”

*     *     *

There was a knock on their door, and Roger went to it with his shotgun ready. He let it droop when Michael crossed the threshold.

“You won’t need that anymore,” he said, gesturing at the weapon.

“I’ll still feel better to keep it.” Roger tilted his head toward the sofa behind him. “He’s sleeping.”

Michael stepped close to the sofa to gaze down at Mark’s gentle profile, his mouth open against a pillow. The room’s stinging blue light made it appear as though the boy had fallen asleep in the glow from a TV, as when he had been alive. “Let him sleep,” he whispered, then he looked up at Davina – who had risen to her bare feet. “Thank you, for taking care of my boy.”

She nodded, but crossed her arms tightly.

“Back at the Demon outpost, there, I acquired a lot of the money you people use here, when I told them I’d be staying in Hades.”

“I don’t want your money,” Davina told him.

“I didn’t mean it the way you think, Davina. What I was going to say is, I paid your next door neighbors, over here, to move to another apartment...so I can have that one.” He turned to study one of the room’s walls, rubbing his goateed chin. “We could put a door right there, don’t you think? So Mark can go through it, any time he wants?” He shifted his eyes to meet Roger’s. “So that one house is no more his house than the other?”

Roger’s eyes began to fill. “Thank you,” he managed.

“Well, I’m not as unselfish as all that,” the Angel replied. “It’s for this guy.” He smiled down at his child, but a half-stifled sob made him look up at Davina. She came to him, put her arms around him. He laughed uncomfortably, patted her back, “Hey, you can share my son, but you can’t share me...sorry.” He flicked his chin at Roger. “This guy is pretty bad-ass...I wouldn’t want to mess with him.”

“What about your wife?” Davina asked huskily.

He slid out of her embrace, his smile strained. “No,” was all he could answer.

*     *     *

Another knocking at the door, and this time Michael rose to answer it. Despite what he’d told Roger earlier, he brought his M16 with him. Mark was awake now, and watched his father with concern.

Michael unlocked and opened the door to see Dawn standing in the hallway beyond, escorted by the two eerie Celestials.

“Honey...” Michael said.

He saw that her eyes were red, but she smiled and told him, “I’m staying, too.”

Michael pulled her through the door, into his arms. The ethereal Celestials looked on without feeling. After they had held each other for a good minute, Dawn peered over her husband’s shoulder and said, “Hi, baby...”

Mark approached them uneasily, but Dawn gathered him into their embrace.

“I’m sorry, Dawn,” he mumbled.

“Shhh. I love you, baby,” she said, her lips moving against the top of his head.

Roger slipped his arm around Davina, should she become troubled by the sight of the reunited family, but she was content and whispered to him, “What about Mark’s real mother, when she dies? She was an atheist; she’ll be here. But we Damned can’t see our loved ones from when we were alive – we’re kept impossible distances apart. So do you think Michael can make them bring Mark’s mother here, too?”

“I don’t know if that’s possible,” he told her. “But this man is...rather determined. And there’s always the apartment of our neighbors, on the other side.” He indicated the opposite wall.

“Hm.” She pressed her smile into his neck. “I’m so very proud of you...my husband”

“And I, you...my love.”

On Making Clam Chowder

STEP 1: Using a rusty opener, remove the lid from the can, being sure to slice the ball of your RIGHT thumb so that exactly four drops of blood swirl into the white gruel. Stir until pink. Pour into sauce pan.

STEP 2: Add three marbles, one gray pebble and one barnacle, that the soup might have texture. Crush twelve generic aspirin and sprinkle into broth.

STEP 3: Heat your fork over the stove's burner so that you can thrust it into the wildly panicked eyes that will blink open in the soup's bubbling skin. Enjoy!

DOOR 7

DOOR 1

The fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft wrote of a god-like alien being named Cthulhu, who was locked in a kind of coma or living death at the bottom of the ocean, and who one day would awaken and arise to destroy the puny human race.

Did you know that the microbes living under the floor of our planet’s oceans make up perhaps a third of all living matter? The amount of methane produced from these mindless, primitive creatures is greater than all the earth’s coal, oil and natural gas combined. It has been postulated that one day the right conditions or some undersea disturbance might release a tremendous “belch” of methane – as may have occurred with devastating effects at the end of the Permian Period – which if it made it to the surface and ignited, could set our whole world aflame. This vast, sleeping giant made up of so many individual slimy cells sounds an awful lot like the hibernating, mollusk-headed Cthulhu to me.

This not so trivial trivia was in the back of my mind when I saw the tank bearing the stenciled word METHANE on the grounds of the company called Odyllic – a great sprawl of heterogeneous offices, plant buildings, warehouses and various smaller satellite structures just down the street from where I lived. Odyllic had apparently gone through several owners and names over the decades, and had to all appearances been abandoned to disuse at last. Or near disuse – but I’ll get to that. Except for the most obscure twitch of life, akin to a flea moving through the hide of a rotting deer, the factory complex was as seemingly dead as the bed of the deepest sea. As a tentacle-faced alien god.

Since I had become laid off from Sunderland Farms, which was located on another forested periphery of this same town, I had taken to long walks during the morning, pushing Logan’s baby stroller. I had started out as a third shift security guard at the Sunderland Farms plant over twenty years earlier, later going into the bakery department – making bread and doughnuts for the Sunderland Farms convenience stores – and later still into the soda plant, where carbonated soft drinks were mixed in huge tanks, bottled and labeled, and where I had eventually become third shift supervisor. Until the Sunderland Farms convenience stores began to disappear, one by one. Until the soda plant’s third shift was abolished. Until the lay offs.

My sleep pattern was disrupted by the change. For the most part I had reverted to a kind of first shift schedule, though there were those nights when I remained awake straight through, plodding aimlessly through web sites, stumbling through an endless loop of numbing TV channels. During the day, my walks pushing Logan’s stroller became longer and longer. Soon I was taking several walks a day. Late afternoon. Early evening. Even, finally, as late as eleven at night, pushing Logan’s squeaky little stroller along the sidewalks of my quiet neighborhood. My street, Mill Street, was bordered on one side by the small outermost buildings of Odyllic – which seemed more of a city unto itself, really, than a mere factory complex. Or even another country altogether. At the end of Mill Street, crossing from its row of drab little houses to the cracked and weed-tufted parking lot of the larger plant structures was more like crossing a boundary line of some kind.

My Aunt Joan and Uncle Ron had both worked at Odyllic for decades, before it was Odyllic. Back then it had still been Farmer Plastics. I can still picture their logo, its cheery font-style against a sky blue oval seeming to represent a 1950's notion of the futuristic, projecting an innocent and beaming faith in the potential of all things plastic. Uncle Ron had worked at Farmer right up until his death from colon cancer in 1967. Aunt Joan had retired shortly before Odyllic took over, and died from cancer herself in a nursing home not so very far away from the company. She had suffered a malignant brain tumor, and my memories of visiting her in the nursing home, my memories of her ranting and babbling, her bellowing curses and her eerie whispers, still echoed in my own brain from time to time.

Though I had been too young to recall, my Aunt had told me that before being Farmer Plastics, the then much smaller company had been Lethe Toys. I remember mourning, as a child, that this toy factory had closed down before I could ever see or visit it. She remembered it from her own childhood, recalled rescuing deformed baby dolls from the trash bins, and described the massive colorful clown face that once loomed across the front of the main plant building, blistering and blackening over the years until it was ultimately taken down. The pale silhouette of the clown’s wigged and huge-eared head could still be discerned, however, if one looked for it.

Wouldn’t Logan have loved to gaze up at that, I thought this afternoon, pushing his stroller across a frozen sea of asphalt, the yellow lines of its parking slots faded to a barely decipherable grid. We passed a little brick warehouse, its one metal door padlocked and its high bullet-shaped windows filled in with cinder blocks. More of a shed than a warehouse, really, it reminded me of the brick storage building near the entrance to Pine Grove Cemetery here in town, which as a boy I had always imagined to be stacked with unburied coffins during the winter – though one summer when the grass was being cut the double doors had been left ajar and I had glimpsed only hanging tools and wheelbarrows inside, disappointingly enough. That cemetery shed had since been converted into a chapel. I supposed this warehouse looked something like a chapel, then, too.

There was no longer any ingress into this warehouse structure except for a lower panel busted out of a big green garage-type door that had obviously once been used for loading or unloading trucks. I could imagine that the stray cats I sometimes saw in the neighborhood, or the kids who bicycled through the parking lot in the summer, might occasionally get down and crawl into that hole to explore the interior of the warehouse. Once I had paused beside the cement ramp that led to the folding garage door, and inclined my head a little to peek inside, but I saw only blackness and had never got down on hands and knees to peer inside more closely.

I pushed Logan’s stroller on, toward the back of the parking lot, its white wheels bucking as they crunched over little bits of gravel and broken beer bottles. By now, I thought, the contoured grips of the stroller’s handles should have left permanent indented marks in the palms of my hands. The stroller had become like a lawn mower I pushed, or a snow blower, a machine I ceaselessly and diligently and mindlessly operated, like one of the machines in the bakery or soda plant at Sunderland Farms...

Even before the lay off, four months previously, my financial situation had often been dire. Money problems make for marital problems, and the tension already existent between my wife and I had been exacerbated to the shattering point by monetary concerns. She had left me just over a year ago. I didn’t delude myself; my long and frequent walks were a distraction, an escape from the too-small house that still rang emptily with her absence. She had a new boyfriend already, even lived in a new town. I was fortunate at least that we had had a fifteen year mortgage on our home and that it was paid off. But Pam was after me to sell the house, so that she could have her half of the money. For my part, I had been putting off pursuing the divorce, so I wouldn’t have to do just that. Because then where would I be, without a home, without a job? I had to admit that she was being very understanding, even sympathetic, despite her frustration with me. Just as my brother was being very patient, after having lent me so much money to get me caught up in my bills, such as my ridiculously huge property taxes. But what was I to do? My fate was in the hands of other men. Politicians and corporations, which are really conjoined twins anyway, loping around horrible and multi-limbed in their beautiful three-piece suits.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the brick warehouse, a stray bit of flotsam that had drifted away from the rest of the complex, sitting like an island in the middle of that desolate parking lot. The late afternoon sun glittered on the pulverized glass of bottles, making the asphalt sparkle like desert sands. The sunlight gave the bricks of the warehouse an ember-colored glow. The golden light fell onto the words stenciled in white paint against the flaking green paint of the padlocked garage-type door. The words read: DOOR 1.

At the far edge of the parking lot there was a paved road tunneling off into the woods that encroached upon the town (though of course it would be more fair to say the town encroached upon the woods). The road ran parallel to train tracks that in turn ran parallel to some of the largest of the factory buildings, themselves like a long line of decommissioned boxcars. I had strolled partway down this tree-flanked path before, but had always been too timid, too concerned about trespassing, to venture very far before I turned back again. But I had to admit it; it was more than simply being reluctant to trespass. That isolated path into the forest conjured a plethora of child-like terrors, instinctual fears. Beasts in the forest; there had been coyotes sighted in town. There were rumors of stray black bears. And strangers, perverts, madmen with knives, might very well lurk in such isolated spots. It just didn’t seem to be a very safe sort of place for a man pushing a baby stroller to embark.

And yet, the little road called to me. How could it not? Because it also conjured a plethora of child-like possibilities. Though I had stepped onto it only a half dozen times at best, each time I had gone just a little bit further than the time before.

I pushed Logan’s stroller to the mouth of the little road. At its threshold I paused. Up ahead, on the right in a little dirt clearing covered in a fringe of grass so thin that it was ghostly, four tractor trailer freight cars had been left like bodies without their heads, oil stains on the pebbles below like blood from their decapitations. I took the first step onto the pavement, in my paranoia expecting some psychopath to step out from behind one of those looming rectangular boxes. Or someone, I didn’t know quite what kind of someone, who would accuse me of trespassing on private property.

Yet my surroundings were desolate. I heard no traffic from the town somewhere off behind me, no radios blaring, no children screaming in play. Not even a dog barking. But the scene was not always undisturbed by man or beast, evidently; I noticed that the road had been resurfaced since the last time I’d been here. It was a smooth, uncracked blackness like a river of hot flowing tar. It felt vaguely soft beneath my soles. It was very curious, considering the decay and disregard that permeated the factory complex. How much traffic down this path could warrant this effort? Those disused freight cars were streaked in rust. Soon they were left behind me. At least the wheels of Logan’s stroller spun smoothly and noiselessly across this new dark coating.

On my left, running alongside this access road, a bed of gravel rose from the tall grass and underbrush to support train tracks. I knew that an offshoot of these tracks had once directed boxcars right into the factory complex, though those rails had long since been left to sprout weeds between their ties.

I looked back over my shoulder. My smooth, comfortable pace along the road had taken me further than I had expected; I saw how distant those freight cars were, looking like a cluster of grazing cows. Facing ahead again, slowing my pace somewhat, I could see what I imagined must be the end of the access road in the distance. There appeared to be an open chain-link gate, with a sign affixed to it. I was already halfway to it. I was already farther down the road than I had ever ventured previously.

“Whew...it’ll be dark soon, huh?” I said, dropping my eyes to the stroller. It was an excuse to go no further. And yet, lifting my gaze again, I said, “Just a little further, huh? Then we’ll turn back and go home. Okay?”

But the road’s straightness and evenness impelled me on, as if I were a train with rails slotted into the grooves of its wheels, being pulled on and on mindlessly.

On my right, now, I could see that a thin stream trickled between the dense trees. From what I could glimpse, it was thickly coated in a vivid green scum, and I imagined it was this that gave the air its new swampy stench. Here and there on the side of the road I saw the occasional heavily corroded mechanical device – whether chunks broken off from a vehicle or a factory machine I had no idea – littered like fragments dropped off some titanic robot that had trudged down this road long ago in search of a lonely place to die.

It was indeed a chain-link gate ahead of me, I could tell clearly now. I couldn’t make out the words on the blistered metal sign attached to it. It appeared that long weeds had grown through the links. The gate was indeed open.

As I glanced down at the quiet bundle in the stroller again, my eyes were drawn to something on the surface of the road. I stopped, let go of the stroller handles to bend over for a closer look. It was a frog that had been run over by a car. No, I realized, it had been pressed under the drum of the vehicle which had smoothed out the then-hot asphalt of this road. The frog had been stamped flat into the tar, and had since decayed into a desiccated mummy-like afterimage of its former self, spread-eagled there, like a fossil.

“Poor guy, huh?” I said, giving the frog a backward look as I pushed the stroller on again. Killed in the very stuff that now preserved it, like a mammoth or giant sloth sunken in a tar bit.

The swampy smell was worse. The sun was lowering behind the treetops, but in the dim woods I could still see that snaking green stream of sludge. I now noticed that the trees bordering the stream were entangled in dark vines. Was it some kind of ivy? As shoelace thin as the creepers were, they still managed to absolutely coat some of the trees, hiding their bark altogether. I drew nearer to the edge of the road, peering more closely at the trees as I moved forward. The vines seemed to grow more profuse which each step I took. If they were ivy, they had withered and lost their leaves; the vines were a dark brown in color, twisty and tendrilled, without any sort of leaves at all. Soon, strands of it actually spanned the air from one tree to another, connecting them up in a huge web. One would need a machete to pass between some of those trunks.

But it was not only the vines that grew so abundantly here. There were small honey-colored mushrooms thronged around the bases of these ensnared trees. Encircling them in a necklace, as if to strangle each tree at its base. And indeed, these trees that were choked in vines and girdled with mushrooms looked sick, or dead altogether.

As strongly as the access road compelled me, lured me on, those vines repelled me. There was nothing that could spark my curiosity enough to make me step into that forest, and let those withered brown vines touch my flesh. I imagined them capturing me, too, in their suspended net.

“Hm,” I grunted, gauging my nearness to that gate. Close as it had become (as if floating toward me while I walked in place on a treadmill), I still couldn’t make sense of its blistered letters, however big and bold they had once been. “I’m getting a headache,” I muttered. “We should be heading back, huh?”

Something else on the surface of the road caused me to stop to inspect it. It was harder to miss than the fossilized frog had been. It was a large turtle, that had been horribly smashed under the wheel of a car or truck. I drew a little closer timidly. The poor thing had just eaten; what I had at first taken to be its intestines were actually several earthworms, pressed out of its belly when it was squashed.

I straightened up, then, to look both ways along the access road. The turtle had been killed recently. So there was still traffic down this road. Well, there had to be, right? They had bothered resurfacing it. They...

But I felt a heightened unease now, as if I might be the next creature to be crushed on this new black road.

I was just short of the gate. So close. But I knew that now it really was time to turn back.

Before I did, however, I craned my neck to gaze beyond the gate (which, rusted brown as it was, looked like it had been woven out of those ugly vines). Shortly past the gate, the road veered to the right, running off toward another huge building belonging to the factory complex. I wouldn’t have expected to find one this size so distant from the rest of the factory city. Some of its blank, black windows had been shattered. A dumpster overflowing with sodden cardboard and pink insulation like masses of rancid cotton candy sat below an elevated loading dock. With the sun sinking behind it, the building was foreboding, like a castle or a fortress abandoned to its ghosts.

In the nearer distance, though, just beyond the gate in another dirt clearing overgrown with ectoplasmic strands of grass, was a capacious white cylinder or drum, so large that a little shack-like structure of metal and wood clung to its side like a parasite. The steps up to this shack were swallowed up in thick weeds that I never would have waded through, for fear of ticks, however much I might like to have a look inside through its broken windows. Or its door, if that were unlocked.

Stenciled on this immense white tank was the word: METHANE.

I was no scientist, but I couldn’t see the connection between methane and the manufacturing of plastic. If that was what Odyllic had in fact produced. Just because Farmer Plastics had created such materials, and Lethe Toys had molded toys from it before Farmer, didn’t mean that Odyllic had necessarily followed suit. To tell the truth, I was not sure just what Odyllic had manufactured.

I steered the stroller in a half-circle, pointing it back the way I had come. The road stretched out so far ahead of me that I couldn’t even, as yet, see those freight cars grazing in the grass. I walked more quickly now than I had while advancing down the path. I heard a crow caw, somewhere off toward the train tracks. I gazed up. There was an object poised on a vine-like line of the telephone poles that stood alongside the train tracks. It glistened green like one of those old glass telephone transformers that I had tried to shatter with rocks as a kid. But instead of being attached to the crown of a telephone pole, it was poised directly on one of the heavy black wires. The setting sun made the green, glassy object sparkle. But it was too far away for me to make out, and it was too late for me to try. I quickened my pace even more, but regretted it when I scuffed my sneaker and lurched forward over the handles of the stroller.

Though the stroller’s bundle was safely belted in, a small baseball hat fell onto the black asphalt. I had to walk around the stroller to squat down, retrieve it. I turned toward the bundle to replace the little red cap.

The blue furry doll was Grover, the puppet character from the television show Sesame Street. The doll had been one of Logan’s favorites; nearly as big as he was. It had rested beside him in his hospital bed. I had even considered putting it in his coffin, but Pam had thought it was too bulky to fit in there with him. His coffin had been so small, I have to admit.

“Sorry,” I said, fitting the cap on Grover’s head again and pulling the soft baby blanket around his hirsute face. I gaped up at the sky. “Jeesh – we really need to hurry, don’t we?”

I half expected nocturnal, flesh-hungry undead corpses to come staggering out from in-between those derelict freight cars. But I saw no one, and when I reached them I knew I was as good as home. A little further, and I was at the start of the access road. Across the parking lot, onto Mill Street, and back to the porch of my little white house.

I unlocked and opened its door, then closed and locked it again behind me. For some reason, I turned to peek out the small window in the door. (My headache had become so intense that I actually leaned my forehead against the cool glass.) The street was silent, devoid of traffic. I felt like the last man on earth, shutting himself in against the awakening terrors of the night. But the only remotely sinister thing I noted was the muted caw of a crow.

DOOR 2

I looked up the word Odyllic in a book. I had a lot of books, so while I didn’t find it in a conventional dictionary I did finally find it in a book called Devils & Demons, another kind of dictionary, by two French authors. J. Tondrieu and R. Villeneuve. Why I even thought to look it up in there I don’t know. But it said that “odyllic force” was an energy that flowed forth from every form of matter. It sounded like the Force in the Star Wars movies, to me. It was claimed that odyllic force could be harnessed and utilized to “create great power”.

Did you know that in 2003, the largest living life-form on the Earth was discovered? In the Blue Mountains of Oregon, researchers for the Forest Service realized that a single gigantic underground fungus, spread out over an area equaling 1,800 football fields, was strangling the roots of fir trees with its web of tendrils, called rhizomorphs. It was postulated that the fungus had been created through the “sexual recombination” of two forms of mushroom – eight thousand years ago. Was I understanding that right? That this plant, this living thing, was eight thousand years old?

An interesting note – and if reading about these garroting, tree-murdering tendrils hadn’t already caught my attention, the following tidbit of information surely did: branching off from this gargantuan organism, aboveground, were clusters of honey-colored mushrooms.

Now, granted, the filaments I had seen linking tree to tree in an immense latticework, along that newly paved factory access road, had been clearly aboveground, not hidden from view below the soil as was this fungus I had read about in a magazine while sitting on my toilet, in an episode that to me was clearly a case of profound synchronicity. But surely the things were related, if not quite the same? No, there could be no doubt – the mushrooms made it conclusive. So, then...was the web of tendrils I had seen in the woods, and all the blooms of mushrooms, a single living entity as well?

And what would have spawned it, nourished it to such extensive growth? The “sexual recombination” of two kinds of mushrooms millennia ago? Or maybe something far more recent, in this case? I recalled the sluggish little trickle of a stream, blanketed under garish lime green scum. Surely that stream was polluted. But could the pollution itself have mutated some local flora? Inspired it to such rampant growth in a shorter span of time than eight thousand years?

Though it had been several weeks now since I had pushed Logan’s stroller down that road – my walks in the intervening time extending no further than the far border of the factory parking lot – my interest in Odyllic became very peaked as a result of chancing upon this article.

But there was more synchronicity in store for me. There is no coincidence, I was coming to believe. There is a mechanical system to space, time, and matter – even organic matter – an order, however tangled, that encompasses everything in an interconnecting web like a fungus. If humans were ever to find the means by which to wrap the strands of this web around their fingers...and then, jerk those filaments like the strings of a marionette...then even God would jump and dance to their tune.

I had become restless this night, pacing the small rooms of my too-small house like a lab animal in its cage. I had dozed off and on for hours in front of the TV, channel-surfing, watching bits of music videos (my attention span was too fleeting for me to even watch one of these visual hors-d’oeuvres in its entirety), shards of documentary-type shows (flash of a gory surgical operation, flash of a gilded sarcophagus’ face), fragments of crime programs (photos of murdered bodies could always persuade my thumb to pause in its key-pressing). I needed to stretch my limbs, to move, but this rabbit warren I was locked up in afforded me so little space to do so. How had three of us ever lived here together?

I went into the tiny bedroom that had been Logan’s, where Grover sat on the bed with a book about himself open in front of him. Though it had grown dark outside, I hadn’t tucked him in yet. My parents had always made me go to bed way too early, even while the sun was still shining in the summer, and I had vowed never to be so harsh.

“Come on, buddy, time for a walk,” I said, scooping the limp-limbed doll into my arms.

I wheeled Logan’s stroller down the road. Behind me, my house dwindled in the gloom like a small plastic toy house.

There was a moan in the air, growing subtly louder as I pushed the stroller along the sidewalk. Floating, wavering, mournful. In the winter, during a storm, it became quite pronounced and very eerie. Tonight was warm but there was a breeze, and this breeze was blowing across the top of a cell phone tower, four of which rose like the masts of a ship just down the street from my house. They were more or less identical, each topped with a triangular arrangement of panels, but only one of them seemed to let out this moan when the wind raced across the top of it. What would the users of cell phones in this area think if they put their little phones to their ears and only heard this melancholy wail pouring forth?

One time, I had ventured across grass right up to the fence, garlanded with barbed wire, that surrounded the base of one of the towers so I could read the placard posted there. It said, “Radio Frequency (RF) emissions may exceed FCC standards for general public exposure. For Your Safety: Maintain a minimum distance of 7 feet from all antennas. Do not stop in front of antennas.” I thought that bit was amusing. “If you are reading this,” it should have added, “it’s too late.”

Further down Mill Street. By the side of the road I spotted a familiar white object; it was a plastic water bottle like a runner or a bicyclist might carry, squashed under a car’s tire. I saw it here and there on my walks, like a piece of flotsam that washed up repeatedly in the tide. Blue words on the bottle said, “Clean Up Your Assabet.” Ha, ha. The motto referred to the efforts underway to clean up Massachusetts’ Assabet River. I found it ironic that this item intended to draw attention to a conservation project had itself become a piece of litter.

Onward. The parking lot was ahead. It was, actually, only one of the factory’s lots, and not the largest. Standing at the edge of the most spacious of these, rocketing even taller than that copse of cell phone towers, was a brick chimney like a cannon aimed at heaven. I could see it from my porch. It was a lone sentinel, staring down imperiously, presiding over the whole of the factory city. Though Odyllic had shut down, I had seen cloud-sized bundles of steam piling out of this chimney last winter. Did a sketchy maintenance crew still need to run boilers or such to keep pipes from freezing, until the complex could be sold yet again? Or were there small pockets of the factory city where work of one kind or another still went on? More on this soon...

I crossed to the other side of Mill Street. I would actually need to cross another, diagonal road before I reached the outskirts of the lot. Waiting for a single car to pass, I stood near the outermost of the Odyllic structures, and what must have been the smallest. And most modern; I’m certain that it hadn’t existed when Farmer Plastics had owned the property. It could only contain two or three rooms, the outside of the flat-roofed little box composed from vertically-ribbed concrete, looking like corduroy or corrugated cardboard. I glanced back over my shoulder at the building, orange-pink light from a street lamp glowing dimly on its surface. One face of the building was entirely made of glass, and a door into the concrete box was situated in the middle of this. The door was glass, too. Even from here I could see the gold letters stenciled on the glass door gleaming in the street lamp’s murky illumination. The letters read: DOOR 2.

Why they should label this as the building’s secondary door, I didn’t know. The only other door into the box was on one of its windowless sides, and it was metal and nondescript and sported no letters at all. It hardly seemed like the primary entrance.

As near as I could tell, this building had been used for meetings, a miniature conference building. I had often looked through its glass, if only from a distance, while walking by. Though there was no furniture in those few rooms now, I could easily imagine long tables resting on the bare carpets, plush chairs ringing the tables, and interchangeable men and women in funereal business suits seated in those chairs, reading the future of company stocks in the vapors from their lattes like soothsayers.

The one lonely car had swished past. I left the tiny, abandoned conference building behind me, crossing into the fissured and littered parking lot, which yawned like a black lake under the night sky.

There was a figure moving across the parking lot in my direction, silhouetted in the glow from another street lamp. A tall lean figure. I changed the angle of the stroller. I wanted to turn right back the way I had come but I couldn’t do that; it would look cowardly. I wished I had seen this dark form in the parking lot before I had crossed the street.

But as the person neared me, and I neared them, widening my angle of approach as much as I could, I saw that it was actually two figures, two forms. The person had a small dog on a leash, and this was why they were in the lot. Such an innocent and prosaic activity put me much more at ease. Now I could hear the tinkling of the dog’s ID tags, and could see that the person wore a baseball hat. By the time the individual spoke to me, I had already figured out that it was a woman.

“Your baby likes a nice night stroll, huh?” the woman asked me.

She stopped. I stopped. I hoped she wouldn’t come close enough to look into my stroller. Her dog peered at me attentively, its leash taut. I gestured toward it. “So does yours.”

The woman glanced over her shoulder toward a long factory building which formed one of the lot’s borders. It was white with windows trimmed in an innocuous sky blue. Along its face were planted a row of hedges that were overgrown, in need of shaping, reverting back to something wilder. Facing me again, the woman moved toward me. I dreaded her approach. In a lowered voice, flicking her head somewhat to indicate the structure behind her, she said, “Not a good idea to bring your baby around this place, though.”

“I live just down the street,” I said in a lame explanation or excuse, regretting then that I should divulge such personal information.

Her little white dog, shaggy as Grover, sniffed loudly and aggressively at my sneakers. I love dogs, and even small animals like cats. I used to have two pet mice as a boy. But there is something unnatural about small dogs that grates on me. They are a travesty, mutations fabricated by man, an insult to their proud wolfish forbears. There is something about them that makes me want to squash them like bugs, even though I would not deliberately squash a bug.

“It’s just that this place isn’t safe, you know?” the woman said in a near whisper, now that she was close. I could see, under the bill of her baseball hat, that she had an attractive face. Short brunette hair. She had a runner’s body, a bit tomboyish in dress and carriage.

“What do you mean?”

But I could tell that she had made out Grover’s blue, bug-eyed face at last. I prayed that she assumed it was merely a toy resting beside a child, that somewhere in the bundle of blankets there was a still a baby, but when her eyes returned to mine I knew she realized the truth.

I stammered, “My son died two years ago.”

“Oh...I’m so sorry. That’s terrible. What...”

“Leukemia,” I told her. “He was three. He’d be five now.” I looked down into the stroller. “He’d be too big to need this.” After another awkward beat: “I was laid off five months ago. I had more time around the house – my wife left me last year – and I was cleaning out the basement. Found the stroller. It made me feel good to get out, you know, go for walks. So I...I started taking this...with me...”

“I’m really sorry. About your wife, too. I know how you feel – my husband left me a year ago, too. He wasn’t sympathetic to me at all. He knew I had medical issues and he didn’t stick by me. People are so disposable now...”

“Right.”

“I used to work for these assholes.” She cocked her head toward the white building with the blue-trimmed windows again, her voice dropping even lower as she took a step even closer. The dog kept snuffling at my feet. “It made me sick...but even the doctors can’t pin it down. Either that, or they’re all paid off, and knowing this place I wouldn’t doubt it.”

Her words were finally getting through to me. “You worked for Odyllic?”

“For two years. In the office...but I got sick, and missed a lot of work, so they fired me, even though it was their fault, of course...”

“So, what did they do in there? What did they make?”

“Oh, these, I don’t know, little plastic beads...green plastic crystals...they sold them to places that heat them up and mold them into things...”

“Oh, yeah, okay – sure – I used to run the third shift soda plant operation at Sunderland Farms right here in town. Those crystals sound like the pellets we’d melt down to mold into soda bottles.”

“Yeah, who knows, maybe your place got their crystals from them. And some of their crystals could be melted down into plastic sheets...you know, like cellophane or shrink wrap...but when they did that, the plastic was clear, not green anymore.”

“Yeah?” I said dubiously. I admittedly knew nothing about cellophane films, but I wouldn’t have imagined them finding their origin in plastic pellets. “So...ah, is this place entirely closed down or what?”

“Ha,” the woman said. She had almost snorted. She had a bitter, ironic grin. “Ha,” she said again, and her eyes glittered intensely under her bill. “They supposedly went bankrupt a couple years ago, right? But I know there are still things going on in there.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Who knows? Research? Military research? They were always very secretive, believe me. They only wanted their employees to know one part of the elephant, not to see the whole picture, keep us blind, you know? But I live over on Willow Street, in a second floor apartment, okay? I can see the office building I used to work in. There’s always a gray car parked there. It’s a make of car that I’ve never seen before. Sometimes there’s another car that’s almost identical but slightly different. Only once did I see both gray cars there together. Company cars. But I’ve never seen anyone get in or out of them. Kind of a silvery-gray...”

“Security people?” I suggested. “And maybe they just leave the car or cars parked there to scare vandals off...maybe there aren’t even any guards inside the building, and that’s why you don’t see anyone...”

Ignoring my suggestions, the woman went on, “Have you ever noticed the helicopters?”

“Helicopters?”

“Black helicopters. I’ve seen them from my apartment. They fly by at night time, right over the plant. One night I saw one land...somewhere on the grounds, I’m not sure where, but I definitely saw it come down. But the thing is, it was totally silent. If I hadn’t seen it, I never would have heard it.” Her grin widened with a fierce kind of triumph, as if she had proven her case.

“Wow,” I said, again lamely. I had to admit that did sound sinister. Some obscure make of helicopter, like those allegedly unclassifiable company cars?

“I’ll tell you another thing.” Closer still. “Look up.” I did. She pointed, straight up. “See that plane going by?” I did. Distant twinkling colored lights. “Okay, and over there?” Shifted arm and finger. More twinkling lights. “And there. See it?” And again. “And there. See?”

“Lots of air traffic,” I observed.

“Yeah. Lots. So why? Why over this place?”

I didn’t want to argue that the airplanes were so far up, they were over lots of places...that the ground as seen from up there was a quilt, and this entire massive factory complex was simply one square of that quilt. But she went on...

“And you see that star, there?” I grunted an affirmative. “You see how bright it is?” She made a scoffing sound. “That isn’t a star.”

I looked directly at her. “What is it?”

“A satellite. A spy satellite. This company owns it. That’s not the only one. That one over there...you see it flickering? Why would a star flicker like that? A satellite...”

“Hmm,” I said. So, Odyllic had made her sick in some way, she had said. Had Odyllic done this to her?

“You know, I don’t think any of these are stars. How do we even know there are stars? Every one of these could be a satellite...that’s what I think. And you see those things? Huh? Look at those things.” She meant the cell phone towers. “You think those things aren’t transmitting all our phone calls right into government offices where they listen to everything we say? And who knows what those things are transmitting into our heads at night when we sleep, you know? Brainwashing us...”

“I’ve heard...people say...it’s not good to live near them,” I mumbled.

“I’m sorry to say this, but your son. Did you ever think about it?”

I stared down at the red baseball cap on Grover’s fuzzy blue head. I couldn’t say anything for a few moments, and fortunately the woman put her hand on my arm so that I wouldn’t have to.

“I have to go, and you should get out of here, too. I saw a security truck recently, something new, and I didn’t like the way the guy looked at me for walking through the parking lot on the other side of the buildings, near Willow Street, where I live. I think he recognized me. They don’t like me – I’m still planning on suing them. Anyway, my name is Marsha. I live over on Willow Street, 15 Willow, on the second floor. Come and see me sometime, okay? Any time you want, feel free to drop in. You don’t have to call. I’m not working so I’m usually home.”

“Thanks, Marsha,” I said. I reached for her hand and we shook.

“Come on, baby,” she said to her rodent, pulling it away. She waved to me. Then she put a conspiratorial finger to her lips, and raised her arm into the air, showing the stars her middle finger. Then she turned away.

As I pushed Logan’s stroller back in the direction of my own home, I threw the receding woman a quick glance. Her long legs looked good in her tight blue jeans. Though it had of course been dark, I could tell she was pretty; in her mid-thirties, I guessed. It was indeed tempting to take her up on her invitation. But then I thought again about her comments, her theories, about the stars...

The night had grown darker, cooler, since I had set out. The sky over the parking lot was too open, too high, but I refused to look up at its stationary glittering stars and moving glittering planes. I crossed toward that little corrugated conference building squatting in its feeble pool of sodium light. I would cut through its mini parking lot. I picked up my pace, anxious to get home as soon as possible. I hadn’t been conscious of the fact, while talking to Marsha, that one of my headaches was coming on. I dreaded it with a fatalistic resignation.

But something made me pause as I cut through the conference structure’s tiny lot. My gaze had been drawn to its glass front, shaded under an overhanging slab of concrete supported by two metal columns. Set back in the darker darkness under this cave-like overhang, I had realized, a weak glow showed inside the building. Calling it a glow was overstating the situation, but there was the most anemic of illumination in one of the rooms behind that face of plate glass.

For the first time, I slowly drew near to the building’s glass door and framing, full-length windows. I pushed Logan’s stroller up onto a slightly raised cement border. At first, I looked inside from a few steps away, not taking my fists off the stroller’s rubber handles.

There was a little corridor behind the entrance labeled DOOR 2. To the left, it turned at a 45 degree angle, past a water fountain and recessed restroom doors, toward what must have been one of the conference rooms. To the right, the little corridor led to a small room, and in was in this room that the light originated. The room’s door was shut, maybe locked to keep out thieves, but it was already barren, stripped of furniture and decorations, the color of its carpet impossible to make out in the barely perceptible illumination coming from two fluorescent tubes running along the ceiling. There was so little light being emitted from them, and the light was such a murky green, that it seemed pointless to leave them on at all. They fluttered or pulsed or strobed ever so subtly.

Something made me take my hands off the rubber handles of the stroller. Made me walk right up to that glass, lean my forehead against its cool surface, and cup my hands to either side of my eyes.

There was a man in the room.

He wore dark slacks, a white dress shirt, his tie hanging down languidly because he floated at the very top of the room, his back against the ceiling, his elbows and knees slightly bent, his eyes shut. At first I thought he must be pinned up there, or suspended in the air by wires, until I realized the truth – that this small empty room was in fact full, filled with water or some other fluid. Maybe the fluid itself was greenish, and not the fluorescent radiance.

My heart seemed to pound against the glass I peered through, as if to break it and let that fluid out. The man was drowned! There were no escaping bubbles of breath; he had to be already dead. How long ago? Had he been like this when I’d passed by the building before? If only I’d looked, then! He must have become locked in the room, trapped...a pipe must have burst...somehow the room had sealed in all of the water...and I must call the police, right away, I must...

I saw the man’s eyes open. As soon as the lids lifted, his eyes were already locked directly on mine. With a little push of his expensive shoes against the ceiling, the man floated down through the liquid slowly like an astronaut in a weightless cabin, his arm reaching out. My heartbeat accelerated; I thought that he was reaching toward me. But then I saw his fingers fumble at a switch on the wall. His grave stare remained fixed on mine right up until the moment the two fluorescents winked out and the small meeting room was plunged into absolute blackness.

DOOR 3

Late that night, because I couldn’t sleep, I watched a movie a friend had once copied for me from a rented video but which I had never gotten around to looking at before. It was subtitled, a sequel to an infamous, fact-based Chinese movie about atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II. These atrocities were actually biological experiments that would have made Dr. Mengele green with envy, conducted at a research base called Unit 731. The main thrust of their research was to develop biological warfare, a super-virulent strain of bubonic plague, but according to the movie the scientists also occupied their time with other experiments such as firing bullets through domino rows of prisoners to see how many could be killed with a single round, and freezing a woman’s hands and arms, then thawing them in hot water, then ripping off their flesh while she was still alive and screaming in horror – staring at the naked bones of her forearms with the bloodless flesh hanging like torn sleeves.

Did you know there is an actual autopsy in this movie? It is an apparently young Chinese woman, naked, whom we see slit open down to the edge of her pubic hair. Her organs are roughly detached and removed, until all that is left is a cavity filled with muddy brown fluid that I could almost smell just by watching the screen. Her organs are yellowish-grayish, corrupted; she is not a fresh cadaver all red and bloody inside. At last, her limbs are sawed off, for no reason I could understand. I do understand that the Chinese film-makers wanted to express their outrage at the biological research of Unit 731...yet I couldn’t help but wonder if by including this actual dismemberment, they were themselves exploiting a human being in a similar way. I suppose it’s a complicated ethical dilemma, utilizing real-life tragedies in a work of entertainment.

When I finally did fall asleep in the early morning hours, on the sofa with the TV watching me instead of me watching it, I dreamed that I wore a white lab coat, and stood over a steel table upon which lay my wife Pam. Naked, her flesh glowing bloodlessly white under the harsh lights. I had a scalpel in my hand, and I leaned over her, began an incision, opened her in one long slice, pressing deep and with force. She was like a rubbery manikin in that no blood flowed from the neat wound, as if I had merely unzipped a zipper. Next, I cut through her breastbone with a long-handled tool. A crunch, a snap, each time I moved the handles toward each other. When I was through her rib-cage, I took the bisected halves of it in my hands and pried them away from each other. It was like opening a door to her interior. Yellow-gray organs swam in a foul brown stew. But I didn’t remove the organs; my green-gloved hands squeezed between then, fished around under them, until I grasped hold of something and began to pull. I extricated a human infant from her body, held it by one ankle, its dripping body upside-down. Its flesh was blue, and sloughing off; a gobbet of decaying meat fell and plopped into the brown stew. But there came a watery gurgle from the inverted infant’s throat. A drowning sort of cry...and the rotting baby gave a shuddery spasm in my hand.

I woke up then, and couldn’t get back to sleep. While I brewed a pot of coffee I took the dishes and glasses that were piled in the sink, crusted with food, and put them in the dishwasher. After that I did a load of laundry that had been heaped on the floor of the bathroom against the side of the drier. By the time the sun had come up, I felt like I had accomplished something that day. I experienced a dull kind of pride, as if I had built a fence or painted a house.

That morning, when I took my first of what would probably be three or four walks through the neighborhood that day, I cut around the right side of the little conference building instead of taking a left through its short driveway. In this way, I passed the windowless rear of the building instead of its glass-faced front.

I came to the edge of the road that separated the conference building from the parking lot I favored in my strolls. I had been hearing odd cries as I approached, but had thought they were from noisy children playing in their back yards. Now, however, I saw a flurry of seagulls spinning and gliding over the parking lot, brilliantly white against a sky of the sharpest blue. We were not near the ocean, so I wondered what had inspired this flock to venture this far inland. I had never seen seagulls in my neighborhood before.

Elusive, ghostly microorganisms swam across the gelatin of my eyes, their presence picked out against that too-vivid sky. The way the gulls dove and dipped, it was as though they were chasing the microorganisms and feeding on them.

Aside from those birds in the air, a whole row of them sat along the peaked roof of the small brick warehouse with the green garage door. From its appearance, this building had to be one of the very oldest structures on the Odyllic site, dating back to the days of Lethe Toys I should think – if not earlier. The gulls shifted along the roof restlessly, letting out halfhearted, muted little squawks as if they were weak or sick. Some of those scything through the air emitted high-pitched squealing squeaks but even these cries sounded subdued.

When I pushed Logan’s stroller across the street, the birds arrayed along the roof launched themselves into the sky with a clapping of wings, their flurry of shadows scattering across the ground like blown autumn leaves. I was sorry to disturb their rest, but I had to follow my daily routine. Routine gives one structure, order, handholds to cling to in life, like jobs and marriages and raising children...

Besides the gulls, there had come two other intruders to my familiar stomping grounds, and I dreaded seeing both of them again. I could still picture Marsha as she walked away the night before, the athletic leanness of her tall body. I was a male animal; even I had hormones spinning through my system like squealing gulls, like those tiny creatures on the microscope slides of my eyes – but was dealing with a disturbed, perhaps outright insane woman worth whatever I might gain from her company, if I took her up on her invitation to visit? No, no, I must resist. Solitude had become my safe routine, if only by default. I hoped that she would not be inspired by our chance meeting to walk her dog in this particular area again, in the desire for another encounter – I prayed that she would no longer stray from that section of the Odyllic grounds facing toward Willow Street, where she lived. Well, she might be so addled, I thought hopefully, that she would not even recall she had met me last night. Then I felt guilty for wishing her to be that far deteriorated...

The other intruder I could still envision, as well. I glanced back across the street at the squat, modern conference building, such a contrast to the brick warehouse architecturally. Though I could only see the foreshortened edge of the building’s glass front from here, I too-clearly envisioned that businessman with his jacket casually removed, still hovering in the flooded room...watching and watching for me to reappear...

What Marsha had said to me last night, and what I had seen in the conference building, had increased my curiosity about Odyllic from an obscure pulse to a deeply throbbing beat. However addled she might be, Marsha had said some things that resonated with me. Particularly about Logan...his leukemia. Hadn’t it ever occurred to me before? Perhaps out of denial, I had never consciously picked up that idea for examination before. But now I did. I turned it over and over in my hands, and lifted it to my nose to sniff at it, and the idea reeked of decay and infection and moldering things. The idea was firm in my hands, as hard and glassy as a fact.

I pushed Logan’s stroller close to the concrete ramp that angled up to the warehouse’s folding garage door. Stenciled on it in white paint, the words: DOOR 1. Above the door, brittle and broken remnants of dead ivy still clung to the mortar between the bricks. A little shudder rippled through me; the ivy reminded me of those webs of fungus I had seen in the forest. I glanced again across the street, but the glass front of the conference building was still angled in another direction. Feeling a new boldness, I took my hands off the stroller’s handles, stepped onto the ramp, and began to hunker down so as to peep through the one broken panel in the bottom of the green folding door.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said a strange, distorted voice behind me.

I spun around, and saw that a boy on a bicycle had come from around the other side of the warehouse, so that I hadn’t been aware of his approach. He had stopped the bicycle not far from the stroller, and stood aside it staring at me. For several moments I was too stunned by his appearance to speak, even though I had seen this boy in my neighborhood from a distance many times, riding his bike or walking to the bus stop. He must have suffered some terrible malformation of the bones in his face. His head was like a cheap Halloween mask, too large to fit him properly, and filled with lumpen rocks that ground against each other when he talked. His face didn’t look realistic to me.

Before I could fumble for words, he went on, “My brother saw a coyote come out of there one time. We don’t go near it...we think they live in there.”

“Could it have just been a dog?” I asked him, finally able to formulate words.

“No. It was a coyote. They live in the woods.” He pointed across the parking lot, in the direction of the newly paved access road. My eyes followed his finger.

“Do you ever ride your bikes down there?” I asked him. “Down that road?”

“No way,” said the boy, and then he was pressing his weight down on one pedal to start his bike’s tires spinning again. Before I could question him further, he was already shooting away.

Afraid that he might circle back and see me peeking into the garage door, I straightened, stepped off the ramp, and wheeled Logan’s stroller back toward my little house.

But rather than dissuade me from investigating the warehouse, the boy’s words only heightened my curiosity. Within my home I paced and paced as if to make up for my abbreviated walk. At last, I picked up a flashlight and tested its batteries to make sure its beam was strong.

Now, I hated to leave Grover all alone in the house, but sometimes I simply had to, as when I did my grocery shopping. So I tucked him into bed and pulled the shades, and triple-checked my door to make sure it was locked behind me before I ventured outside once more...praying that the deformed boy on his bicycle had zipped around the corner to play on one of the other quiet little back streets.

Feeling bolder, this time I cut through the driveway of the conference building. I stopped, at somewhat of a distance, to confront its glass door, DOOR 2, and its flanking plate glass windows. The glass reflected the blue sky and the wheeling gulls, as if the gulls swam in blue water inside the building. My heartbeat growing heavier, I moved closer. Closer. At last, my forehead against the cool glass, I cupped one hand to the side of my face as I pointed the flashlight’s ray into the meeting room where I had seen the floating man. The room was empty. Not just of the man, but of the greenish water or fluid that had filled it to its ceiling. But could I really tell if the water no longer filled that room? At least, it appeared to have been emptied. I couldn’t make out, in the gloom, if the carpet were soaked or dry. Those two anemic fluorescent lights had not been turned back on.

Had I really expected to see the man there, in broad daylight? Of course not. Would he even come here again, now that I had spied upon him? Tonight, in revenge, would he stand outside the windows of my house, gazing in at me?

I moved on...crossed the street...back to the brick warehouse, and its garage door. DOOR 1.

Naturally, I looked this way and that before I hunched down at the bottom of the door. I was looking out not only for the boy on the bike, but any passing cars. The boy did not reappear, and there was no traffic on this neglected factory road. There was nothing I could do about people gazing out of the windows of their homes. Without further hesitation, I got down on hands and knees on the concrete ramp and shone my light inside the warehouse.

There was no coyote crouching and snarling in my beam. To my relief, I saw that there were no real places for a coyote to be hiding in wait – the warehouse was almost entirely barren. I scrambled quickly inside...and rose to my feet.

The only features on the brick walls were the interiors of those arched windows that had been filled in with cinder blocks. The only sunlight that entered the building came through the broken panel near my feet. The cement floor was bare, oil-stained here and there. There did seem to be a little dried grass like straw in several of the corners, calling to mind the bed of an animal, but that might have simply blown in here through the broken door. There was a faint, musky animal smell that aggravated my mounting headache, but did a coyote have to be responsible for this? More likely, feral cats such as I had seen in the neighborhood, skunks or opossums, had been in here to investigate or shelter from the winter cold over the years.

I would have expected evidence of human animals. Graffiti on the walls, maybe a stained mattress. Cigarette butts, beer bottles, used condoms. There was absolutely none of that. Could I possibly be the only person who had felt curious enough, brave enough, to have ventured inside this place? Then again, I didn’t know how long that lower panel had been knocked out of the door. Oddly, there was no sign of the broken panel either outside or in...

I walked to the very center of the floor, my footsteps echoing, running my bean over the ceiling and walls, then pointing it into the two far corners. Like the two behind me, the corner on the left was empty except for some yellow grass, brown leaves. But there was a small pile of debris that had been swept into the far right corner and never removed. Though it was too small to be hiding a coyote, I moved toward it with a funny trepidation.

Mostly broken bits of wood, a few lengths of pipe. I pushed through it with the toe of my shoe. Toward the bottom of the stack of wood was one large piece: a door removed from its hinges. It rested unevenly across the floor, obviously piled atop some other bits of junk. Pointing my flashlight under the angled door, I saw a teasing hint of bright color. I began pulling away the debris with my hands now, having set the flashlight down on its side with the beam still switched on.

I uncovered the discarded door, but before I hauled it out of the pile I retrieved my light and aimed it at the wooden surface. Nailed into the wood was a brass number. The number: 3.

I dragged the door off to the side, lay it down, and then bent to examine the items that had been wedged beneath it. For a few moments I didn’t touch them – just bathed them in the glow of my flashlight. The beam shone through their glistening green, translucent forms, casting green light on the cement floor. Finally, I picked up one of the three items. The intact one, the other two having been broken. A little green arm, a little green leg, a little green head littered the floor at my feet, snapped off from two little green bodies.

They were baby dolls. They had to date back to when Odyllic had been Lethe Toys. Back to a time when things were still manufactured in this country. Though why they should be molded out of this hard, crystalline, emerald green plastic – smooth and clear as glass – instead of soft rubbery plastic I couldn’t say. Test experiments for a molding process? Or would these toys have been coated in softer plastic later?

I held the doll by one arm away from me, as if I expected it to suddenly squirm or gurgle. I kicked at one of the two bodies at my feet. All three had diminutive penises. I had never seen an anatomically correct doll like this, and it seemed especially weird if the dolls dated back decades. There was another odd feature. The three dolls were frozen in three different poses, none of them having articulated limbs – and each wore a different expression. The one I held had its eyes closed and its lips parted slightly open. One of the two on the floor had its eyes apparently open and its lips pouted shut. But the broken-off head, when I rolled it under my toe, had the expression of a crying infant – its face scrunched up in silently wailing misery.

I considered taking the unbroken baby doll with me, but I didn’t like the idea of having it in my house, as if it had been molded out of some poison fluid turned solid. The house was Grover’s place, and he wasn’t hard and green...he was soft and blue. I set the thing down delicately by its arm, afraid to shatter it as the other two had shattered. For some reason, as if I had exhumed them from a grave, I moved the door labeled 3 back on top of them...to hide them from view once more.

DOOR 4

During hours of random internet surfing I chanced upon a photo of a dead child. The child was buried in gravelly dirt, his or her face the only portion showing. The face was pale and eerily beautiful, devoid of signs of violence, except that its open eyes showed no irises, no pupils, as blank as those of a stone bust. The beautiful blind-staring cherub’s face was like a discarded mask dropped onto the sand. I read the story that accompanied the image...

Did you know that in 1984, methyl isocyanate leaked from a tank at a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, resulting in the death of over 3,800 people? Thousands more people suffered permanent injury or disability as a result of the exposure to the leaked gas. In 2002, lead, mercury and something called organochlorines had been discovered in the breast-milk of local women. Children with cleft palates and three eyes or a single eye had been born to mothers who as children had been exposed to the Bhopal disaster. But even as of 2003, Union Carbide – now owned by Dow Chemical – had not cleaned up their abandoned pesticide factory.

My headaches were getting worse by the day.

I’d come upon the method of smearing a pain relieving cream, meant for arthritis and back ache, across my forehead. The cream helped burn through the tense knots of muscle in my brow, and the strong wintergreen smell cleared out my sinuses a bit, causing my nose to run, especially when I smeared a little above my upper lip. Mostly, I think the burning pain of the cream on the surface of my skin simply helped distract me from the deeper pain of the headaches, if only for a little while.

The pain seemed centered above the bridge of my nose, between my eyes, and it felt like a bullet was lodged there in the bone. I took it to be a stubborn sinus infection, and I’d been putting off a visit to my doctor; surely a dose of antibiotics would relieve it. I had, in fact, called one time to schedule an appointment. The receptionist who answered my call was plainly sobbing; I was surprised she’d even picked up the phone at all in that state. Blubbering an apology, she’d put me on hold, and I’d waited ten minutes or so listening to canned Muzak before I finally gave up, hung up, telling myself I’d try again later, but I hadn’t.

Several days after I ventured inside the brick warehouse, I decided to expand my exploration of the Odyllic grounds. Actually, it was a spur of the moment decision; I was already out in the familiar parking lot, pushing the stroller around its borders. On impulse, as I came upon a road that branched off from the lot, I turned into it, and found myself pushing the stroller along a sort of shaded corridor between two buildings, then taking a left turn into a second such corridor before another, larger parking lot stretched open in front of me. This was the largest of the Odyllic lots, the main lot for the primary production building...a veritable ocean of blacktop.

A few cars were parked on the periphery of the lot, but I suspected they had nothing to do with the company – probably other people in the area taking advantage of the unused space the abandoned lot afforded. The backs of several businesses and an apartment house, after all, bordered the far edge of the lot. Those buildings were on Willow Street, and Marsha must have been living in that tenement right there, her apartment on the second floor. I hoped she wouldn’t happen to glance out her window down into the lot.

There were two vehicles parked close to the massive factory building itself, however. Both were silvery-gray in hue, and they were very similar if not identical in style. These must have been the company cars Marsha had alluded to. Unfortunately, I had never been very interested in cars, so if they were of some obscure make it wasn’t apparent to me.

Atop the building, besides a number of air conditioning units as big, themselves, as small houses, was a huge metal pipe that ran off the roof, down the side of the building, and emptied into a little caged-in enclosure. I had seen an identical arrangement – the other end of the same pipe, in fact – on the opposite side of the building, facing the lot where I usually strolled. Whenever I contemplated this silvery pipeline, I always wondered if some child had ever thought to climb up into it like a hamster in an exercise tube, then slide back down inside it, from the roof to the ground. It seemed inevitable that someone would have at least thought of doing so. The whimsical appeal of this pipe draped over the top of the plant seemed to complement the pale silhouette of the Lethe Toys clown head, which I could just make out on the face of the building, above its banks of greenish-paned windows.

It seemed to take a half hour just to cross the parking lot, but at last I reached the far side of the main plant building. And here was the place where the immense brick chimney – surely the tallest structure in town – was rooted, soaring into the sky like a sequoia stripped of all its branches.

As a boy I had cut through this lot a hundred times either on my bike or on foot, but I had never dared approach the base of the great chimney. Then again, the parking lot had been filled in those days with dozens and dozens and dozens of cars. From inside the building had come grinding sounds, screeching sounds – hissing, clanging and pounding noises. Once, in a museum, I had listened to a tape recording of the shy voice of an extinct passenger pigeon. These sounds of American industry should have been recorded for posterity, as well. Not the slightest metallic clink came from the long and looming main plant building as I moved toward the foot of the lighthouse-like chimney for the very first time.

I glanced over a bit uneasily at the two gray company cars before I stepped around the corner of the building and into the cool shadow of the skyscraper-huge chimney. The whole bottom section of the shaft itself, in fact, was colored blue in the shadow of the plant, though where the chimney plunged into the brassy afternoon sun it virtually glowed red as if monstrous temperatures flamed inside it. It was bigger around than I had even imagined, and looking straight up its length was dizzying. It was a warm day; if it had been cold, would I now be seeing steam pouring from the smokestack’s summit?

Looking down at the base again, I realized there was a metal door like that of some old furnace built right into its brick-scaled hide. I took a few steps nearer to read the words marked in red paint on the black iron hatch. Though the paint was badly flaked away, I deciphered the letters as spelling out: DOOR 4.

My headache had me nearly in tears; I knew it was a bad time to be expanding on my usual afternoon walk, and decided to head back toward home. As I turned, however, I heard a loud and ringing clang behind me. It was as if a metal surface had been pounded with a hammer, a tire iron, something heavy...

I looked back at the black iron door with the red letters. I expected to hear another gong-like blow, but there wasn’t any. Just the metal contracting, or expanding, due to a change in temperature?

Retracing my path, I  had crossed half of the lot’s span when I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. It was not at all unusual for cars to cut through the various lots of the derelict factory as a shortcut to reach this street or that street, sometimes escaping the traffic tie-ups in the center of town on a busy Friday afternoon like this one. But as the vehicle passed me, at a discreet distance from me, I looked up to see that it was a white truck with colored lights across its roof, like those of a police car. Though there was no identifying seal or such on the passenger’s side door, I knew that this was the security vehicle that Marsha had mentioned. Inside it, I caught a glimpse of an older gentleman with white hair. When he met my eye, he raised his hand in a pleasant little wave. For a moment there I had been so alarmed to see his vehicle that when he simply waved at me, and drove on by without asking me why I had been gazing up at the chimney, I gave him a relieved smile and a wave of my own. See? I thought at him...I’m just a dad taking his baby for a walk.

I couldn’t help feeling, though, that he had in fact seen me gaping at the brick tower...and had very deliberately come out of wherever he had been lurking to make his presence known to me.

“Oh God, this is terrible,” I said to Grover regarding the pain in my skull, quickening my pace. I was even feeling nauseous from the agony...

I was able to nap briefly, but it barely dimmed the pain, so I swallowed my seventh and eighth pills of the day and took a package of frozen corn out of the freezer to hold against my forehead. In addition, I stepped out onto my front porch to breathe in some fresh air, the interior of my house always so stifling and stagnant, the suffocating stink of claustrophobia.

It was a windy night, and actually almost chilly; one of my white plastic lawn chairs had blown over and I almost tripped across it as I stepped outside. I righted it, and as I straightened up I could hear even from this distance the wind moaning across the top of that cell phone tower, like a giant blowing into a flute. I could also hear a train rumbling along that track which ran parallel to the newly paved access road.

I stood out there for only five minutes or so, pressing my impromptu ice-pack to my cranium, and was about to turn back inside to vegetate in front of the TV again when my eyes were drawn to a movement in the night sky. A wash of gooseflesh rippled over my skin. I was certain that I had seen a very bright star shoot to the right before it became stationary again. For me, it looked as if the star had only moved, oh say a foot, but of course out there in space the distance might have been light-years for all I knew. If what I was seeing were a star, it was impossible. If what I was seeing were a star...

I stared at it for five full minutes, but it didn’t shift again, nor did any of its neighbors. At last, reluctantly, suspiciously, I went back inside. I triple-checked that I had locked both the hallway door and the inner door behind me. So I sextuple-checked, actually.

After an hour and a half of TV my ice-pack had become less than icy, while my headache had regained in intensity. I glanced at Grover, up too late in his little plastic rocking chair. “Jesus, this is too much...I have to call the doctor tomorrow, I have to...”

I pressed my palm against my forehead in a useless gesture of comfort, and what my hand met there gave me a jolt. I was then springing to my feet and scuffing into the bathroom fast in my slippers.

“Oh my God,” I muttered, looking into the mirror of the medicine cabinet. There was an egg-like lump directly above the bridge of my nose, a hard swelling tender under my gingerly probing fingers. “Oh my God,” I whispered again. I decided an appointment with my primary care physician would not be soon enough – I must go tonight, right now, to a hospital emergency room, however much I dreaded the ride to the city and the wait I would doubtlessly endure before I could be seen.

I survived the ride, drank a coffee and watched TV in the emergency ward waiting room, my eyes too pained to read a magazine. After an hour of waiting here, I was ushered at last into a room – where I waited an hour more. Finally, my doctor arrived. Though he was in his scrubs and a white coat, he wore thick dark sunglasses. My first, irrational thought was that he might be blind, though logic and his actions indicated that he couldn’t be.

“And where was this lump you felt?” the doctor asked, kneading my scalp, then my forehead. His breath smelled strongly of coffee, with alcohol, I think, underlying that.

“Right here...in the middle.” I pointed to the bridge of my nose. I wanted to tell him to take those dark glasses off.

“Hmm...nothing there I can feel,” the doctor mused.

What was he saying? The lump had been like a cue ball grafted onto my skull. I brought my own hand up again, brushing against his sleeve, and felt the region for myself.

The man was right. The lump had utterly vanished.

“It was here,” I stammered. “It was big...”

“Did you hit your head? It may have just been a contusion, that went away...”

“No, I didn’t hit my head. This thing was big...it was...big...”

“Umm...not anymore.” The doctor removed the purple rubber gloves that he had donned before touching my apparently virulent skin. Unconsciously, though, at least I hoped unconsciously, he fingered one of the finger holes. “Maybe it submerged into hiding, huh? Moved to another spot?” He smiled, but saw I wasn’t smiling. Thankfully, he threw away his gloves. “Did you know that physicians used to think the uterus traveled around throughout a woman’s body? And that this was the source of a woman’s emotional or mental disturbance? Hence the term ‘hysteria’.”

“Hm,” I grunted. But later, as I was walking to my car in the hospital’s lot, I felt around other parts of my head for that tricky, elusive lump.

I arrived home late, and utterly exhausted, but at least with the disappearance of my “contusion” my headache had dissipated at last. Though I was feeling better, I still wasn’t up to the task of picking up the litter that the wind had blown onto my property in my absence – mainly, a long shroud of cellophane that clung to one of the porch’s support beams, fluttering in the air like a specter. Another sheet of this material had draped itself over one of my untrimmed hedges like a huge, quivering soap bubble. I put off gathering them up until tomorrow.

With my nausea having mostly subsided, I was able to eat a little something before I put Grover and myself to bed (I’d left him in his rocking chair, with cartoons playing on the TV). I no longer slept in the bed I had shared with Pam, instead stretched out on the sofa and buried myself in a nest of blankets in want of laundering, drifting off in a soothing blue bath of cathode rays.

I fell asleep watching a program on the Holocaust, and dreamed of sad, withered bodies loaded into ovens like cordwood. The bodies were not nude, however, instead dressed in powder blue coveralls like prison garb, or the uniforms of laborers. Also, the people who fed these bodies into the furnaces wore expensive black business suits, not Nazi uniforms, but when they were done they goose-stepped away in a neat line. I heard a child crying beyond one of the thick metal hatches, and I came out from behind a pile of scrap wood and heaped dolls (at least, I think they were dolls) where I’d been hiding, pushing Logan’s stroller ahead of me. I went to that metal door to let the poor wailing child out. In bright red letters on the door, which was set into a wall of brick like a giant kiln, were the words: DOOR 4.

But I pulled and pulled at the door’s latch futilely, unable to budge it...

And when I happened to glance down at Logan’s stroller, I saw that its blanket was unraveled, a red baseball cap resting atop it – Grover himself having disappeared.

DOOR 5

The lump had come back. Resurfaced, I should say. But rather than being situated above the bridge of my nose, it was up at the top of my forehead, on the right, at the edge of my receding hairline.

Did you know that “sarcomata, if allowed full progress, may attain great size”? I read about this in Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, written by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle in 1896. I had a copy from a 1982 reprint. Among the book’s countless harrowing photographs and drawings were some examples of lipomas and fibromas, and sarcomas of a rampant size that one would no longer expect to see in these modern times. One pendulous “lipoma of the parietal region” hanging down from a man’s face in a great teardrop was over three feet long, and had dragged his ear a third of the way down its length. One man with a “sarcoma of the nasal septum” looked like an amphibious alien, his nose a broad rectangle of flesh, his right eye pushed around to the side of his head. A cauliflower-like mass of meat covering a young man’s left eye was a “hypertrophic tumor of the scalp and face”. And an especially alarming photo showed a five-year-old boy with a huge glistening blob sprouting from his left eye socket, coolly termed an “epithelioma of the orbit”. Maddeningly, the book didn’t indicate the boy’s fate, if he had survived his condition or not – one could not tell from his staring, gaping face in the photograph if he were alive or dead. The growth looked almost as big as the boy’s head, and had reached that size in only a few months.

Immediately upon waking I had decided to explore more of the sprawling Odyllic site today; specifically, I wanted to venture down that access road again, and get a close inspection of the building I had viewed beyond the rusted gate that I had stopped just short of passing through. Discovering the hard swelling at my hairline, though, gave me a little jolt of panic. As I fingered it, I struggled with whether or not to see a doctor about it again. There was no tenderness, and I didn’t have one of my headaches...so ultimately I decided to wait and see how it looked, and how I felt, later. My intentness to explore returned at full force. I embarked with my stroller.

The sun had just risen above the horizon, and caused a fluffy white contrail to blaze against the pale blue sky. Despite the early hour, airborne vehicles had been busy; through the rooftops I could see another contrail, and I heard a helicopter in the distance.

When I reached the little conference building, the neighborhood’s houses had fallen behind and I had a clearer view of the sky. Its spectacle made me stop and stare. The sound of the helicopter faded away off in the direction of the woods.

Three airplanes must have recently passed across the sky in three different directions; one diagonally this way, another diagonally that way, and a third parallel to the horizon. Or had it all been one plane, crossing and re-crossing the sky? Whatever the case, the three contrails intersected, forming a perfect triangle. One of those rearing cell phone towers blocked the configuration a bit so I moved further ahead to see the triangle from a better vantage point. From this angle, the triangle was perfectly situated – framed – between two of the four cell phone towers. These were silhouetted against the sky, each tower with a triangular crown, like idols raised to this heavenly manifestation – high-tech Stonehenge. The contrails were slowly drifting apart, but for the moment in this dawn light they glowed like a hot brand pressed into the sky’s pallid flesh.

A steady, cool morning breeze moaned across the top of one of the cell phone towers.

Something occurred to me, and I turned to look directly behind me. I faced that plate glass window through which I had seen the man floating in the flooded room. The sign in the sky seemed to have been perfectly aligned for someone in that chamber to view.

On an impulse, I looked around my feet until I found a rock at the edge of the miniature parking lot. I tossed it in my palm a few times, gauging its weight, getting its feel, before I wound up and hurled the stone with all my force at the window.

The rock bounced off, the glass too thick for the projectile to pierce, but it did leave a nasty spider-web on the surface. Partly exhilarated, partly horrified at my actions, I glanced all around me to see if there had been any witnesses, shoving the stroller ahead of me in a near jog. Fortunately, I saw no one. Fortunately, no alarms had gone off. But I hadn’t dared pick up the stone and try a second time. I could only hope that if the room should be filled again, the pressure of the fluid would burst through that weakened point. I pictured the glass shattering wide, then, and the man slipping out like a newborn infant in that gushing discharge. I imagined him flopping, convulsing, suffocating in the air like a fish.

They would know it was me, I was sure of it. Not some mischievous neighborhood kid, but me. Well, let them come, then. It was too late to take it back. A line had been crossed, a window cracked, a door opened...

I didn’t slow my pace until I had crossed the street, then the larger parking lot, and come to the mouth of the freshly paved access road.

I paused. A metal sign was posted there, stabbed into the earth. It leaned a little to the side, as if it had been there a long time, but I had never noticed it before. It read: Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

Maybe I had had no cause, up until lately, to take note of that sign. But I didn’t think so. I thought it had just recently, very recently, been planted there. Furthermore, it didn’t strike me as being a warning to the general populace. I had seen no children riding their bikes down this road, no people venturing this far to walk their dogs. The sign was plainly speaking to me, alone.

“Fuck you,” I spoke back to it in a whisper, smiling tremulously, as I pushed the stroller onward. Despite my bravado, however, the warning had strummed a vibration through the harp-strings of my nervous system that continued to resonant faintly.

On my right I passed those four headless tractor trailer freight cars. Idly I wondered what, if anything, might be inside them. Mildewed mattresses that teen lovers had soiled? Porn magazines? Candle stubs? Spent hypodermic syringes? Pentagrams painted in the blood of sacrifices to this or that evil force?

On my left, on a rise built from earth and gravel, the train tracks...and behind those, a string of deserted Odyllic buildings tapered off, the attenuated end of the main, central complex. Their windows, some broken black, observed me with cold detachment, without alarm, like a man watching a caterpillar inch its way along his sleeve.

Deserted buildings, maybe. How could I know what machines might still be running in the corners of huge rooms cast in utter darkness, no loud sounds or even lighted buttons giving away their hulking presence to people at a distance – robot machines that didn’t even require an illegal immigrant paid minimum wage to operate them? How did I know whether men sat at desks placed in the center of these otherwise stripped, cavernous rooms, their computer monitors the only illumination, like campfires they warmed their hands over as if they were homeless squatters in three-piece suits?

I heard the rumble of an approaching train. This inspired a pang of anxiety; would its crew, if they spotted me, phone and report my presence as a trespasser? I reassured myself that this train must originate from a place out of Odyllic’s orbit, that there was nothing to worry about. And here came the train now. There was no light blazing on the engine’s face; I realized that its green-painted caboose was leading the way, as if it pulled the rest. Freight cars resembling those trailers I had gone by thundered past in a long necklace. At last, the engine rocketed by and I turned to watch it recede in the direction of the main complex of Odyllic, and the town beyond that. I had seen commuter trains with an engine at either end, but it didn’t seem safe to me to have this train barreling along at such speeds in reverse. How could the engine’s operator tell if a car was stalled at a railroad crossing, a child was playing on the rails, a suicidal man was standing with his arms out-thrust directly in his path?

The rumble of the train faded and vanished, leaving only the chitter of birds. I continued on.

Despite my nervousness at being on this now clearly forbidden property, I had fallen into a kind of reverie as I pressed on. But the caw of a crow off ahead of me somewhere sharpened my senses.

As if through some instinct, my eyes lifted to that sagging telephone wire where I had seen something green and glassy the last time I’d been down here. It had reminded me of a telephone pole transformer, despite being situated on the wire itself. I was certain that this was the stretch of wire I had seen it on, these the two poles that had supported that wire. I stopped, contemplating it. My gaze dropped below, to the grass growing through the gravel that trickled down from the train bed. A glimmer of sunlight on something shiny, and green. I wanted to investigate but I didn’t want to leave Grover behind, and pushing Logan’s stroller over the bare earth would be too awkward, so I unbuckled Grover and carried him against my chest in one arm. I stepped off the paved road, crunching across the oily dirt, tall weeds stroking my legs like the hands of ghosts.

This had to have been the object I had seen perched on the wire, but it was shattered now. Had someone thrown a rock at it, as I had thrown rocks at glass telephone transformers as a boy, or had the wind dislodged it? I now stood directly over the fragments, and squatted down to prod them with one finger. The object had struck the gravel and been obliterated, but there was one large chunk that I ultimately picked up and turned this way and that. I raised it high enough to see the sun glowing green through its transparent surface. It was plastic, not glass. And the chunk I held was finely detailed. Feathers. It was the wing of a plastic bird.

I rose. Dropped the wing to the gravel. It broke into three pieces. Grover and I turned back toward our abandoned stroller, into which I tucked him again, rearranging his blanket and red cap. We had to keep moving forward. We mustn’t be distracted from our goal, whatever that might be, at the end of the access road.

If we’d passed the spot where the frog had been pressed into the asphalt, I had missed it. And there was no longer any sign of that squashed turtle. Now I could see the rusty fence with the indecipherable old sign. This time, this time I would step through its open gate.

I did not look toward the forest bordering the road on the right. I ignored the vines I knew were laced throughout the trees. I disregarded the swampy stench of the stream under its layer of green algae. I would not be distracted.

At last, the rusted gate, opened fully on its hinges. The access road turned sharply to the right. In its overgrown lot stood the white tank labeled METHANE, that little shack-structure affixed to the tank’s side like a smaller, conjoined twin. I stepped through the gate. I continued to follow the road, now pointing me toward that huge block-like factory building I had never suspected lurked this far back on the Odyllic property.

The road seemed to gird it like a moat, and so I began to circle the building. Broken windows gaped at me. Unmarked metal doors indistinguishable from each other were set into the flanks of the plant or warehouse or whatever it had been. At its rear, in shadow, there was a single picnic table that workers had once lunched at, badly worn by exposure to the weather. I approached it, scanned its surface for cryptic messages carved in the wood, but found none. I continued on, reaching the far side of the structure. I could glimpse little inside it through those shattered windows; darkness, or else sunlight shining through onto empty walls.

I had completed my circle. The building was as anonymous an industrial structure as could be imagined, its only real feature being the shipping/receiving dock up front, and the attendant dumpster stuffed with stripped insulation and other debris. I turned my attention back to the white methane tank. Then, found myself drifting toward it.

Could there still be gas trapped inside it, despite the peeling paint and long streams of rust?

This time, I decided, I would chance the risk of ticks, and plow through the tangled weeds swallowing the base of the thing, mount the metal stairs and have a look through the shack’s broken windows.

Again, I left the stroller empty behind me, cradling Grover in one arm. I held him high against my shoulder as I tramped through the underbrush, not wanting ticks to latch onto his blue fur. I reached the short flight of grille-like metal stairs, much corroded, and they rang with hollow clangs as I ascended to the metal platform upon which the little wooden shack stood. Its white paint and staring windows made it look like an immense skull one could climb inside.

I leaned close to one of these socket-like windows, to peep inside. It was murky in there...but I did see something. Something on the wall...

I faced the door to the shack, wondering if it were unlocked, and that was when I noticed for the first time the letters stenciled upon it in faded and chipped black paint. DOOR 5.

The knob turned. I pulled the door toward me, and the weeds poking up through the slots of the grilled floor feebly tried to hold it back but were crushed. I crossed the threshold into the stuffy, humid gloom, too drawn by the obscure thing I had glimpsed on the wall to be concerned about a possible face-full of spider webs.

Sunlight entered through the open door, and glimmered on emerald-hued plastic as clear and hard as glass, and I heard myself gasp dramatically. I wanted to take flight, just spin on my heel and run, but at the same time I was mesmerized. Dust motes swam calmly, glinting also, in the shaft of admitted light. It was an hypnotic, suspended moment.

There was a human figure affixed to one wall of the shack. It was lashed there with rusty metal wires, which randomly crisscrossed the room in lieu of spider webs, their ends moored to eye screws in the floor, walls, ceiling. Wires around the figure’s arms, which were outspread in crucifixion. A wire around the neck, the other end of it wrapped around a light fixture in the ceiling. Wires around the ankles. Wires – anchored to eye screws that had been screwed directly into the green plastic – appeared to hold open the dissected flaps of the effigy’s body. For this manikin of translucent plastic had been molded in a posture of vivisection. The incision in its front extended from the throat to the pubic bone. There was no penis. Despite the shortness of the figure’s wonderfully detailed hair, it was obviously a woman. Her small breasts were spread to either side of the wide, appalling wound. Inside the wound glistened an array of green plastic organs as clear as ice. Some of them had been sculpted in such a way that they looked as if they could slip out of their cavities and splat (or in this case, shatter) on the floor at any second. One loop of intestine was already hanging down, almost obscuring her genitals.

I studied her hands, the gnarled fingers, the creases in her palms. Then, her face. Her mouth was open a little, so that I could see some of her pellucid teeth and a bit of green tongue. Her eyes were closed in death. But, though the figure was meant to represent a partially dissected corpse, there was a lingering tightness in the features, as if the woman had died only moments ago and her facial muscles hadn’t fully relaxed yet. Her final scream still echoing in this small, too small room.

I might not have realized that the figure was Marsha, had a second figure not been lashed to the ceiling. It wasn’t as exposed to the sun as Marsha was, but I could tell that it was a green model of her little scruffy dog. It was more wrapped up in the snaring metal wires than Marsha was, as if it were in the process of being cocooned. I could touch it if I reached my arm up and stood on my toes, but I had no desire to touch either form.

They had murdered her, I thought. For talking too much, maybe to other people besides myself. For trying to sue them, to fight them. Then they had made a cast of her tortured body (I could see a deep, almost severing wound through one thigh that was not simply a break in the plastic), and from that cast had molded this replica.

Or was this just a casting? Only a manikin, a model? What else might they have done to Marsha and her dog?

Finally I was able to break the spell, back away, into the sunlight again. I closed DOOR 5 gently, as if I had intruded into Marsha’s house and didn’t want to wake her and the dog from their nap.

I anticipated turning around and seeing that white security truck bearing down the road toward me. Seeing someone crunch out of the bushes, pointing a handgun with a silencer. But the grounds were as deserted as ever. I hopped down the grate-like steps, jogged back to the stroller, and buckled Grover in. I had seen enough. I had seen too much. It was time to get home before I was seen, in turn.

The walk seemed longer than it had before, as though the access road had mysteriously doubled in length. The suffocating heat inside the shack had started a headache to brewing. When at last I arrived at the start of the access road, the headache had already increased to a dizzying level. I reached up a hand to touch the lump, around which the pain was centered.

I felt a wetness there, and jerked my hand away, expecting to see blood on my fingers. It was a clear, watery fluid, but I was certain it had come from a little sore I had touched in the center of that knob-like swelling.

I arrived at my little house on Mill Street and locked my door behind me, but without any sense of relief. I rushed into my bathroom to have a look at my reflection. There was, unquestionably, a fluid seeping out of a ruptured little wound in the growth on my forehead.

In the kitchen, I snatched up my phone and dialed my doctor’s office.

Over the receiver, there came only an oddly distant moaning or howling sound. It took me several moments to understand what I was hearing. It was the sound the wind made when it blew across the top of that cell phone tower down the street.

“All right,” I said into the phone. “Okay,” I said, as I returned it to its cradle. I smiled grimly, struggling to stay tough, to keep my fear at bay. I would not let them terrify me, to beat me down, however hard they might try. “All right,” I said again, to Grover this time, who sat at the kitchen table in Logan’s old high chair, which I had found in the cellar when I rediscovered his stroller.

After that, I did not attempt to contact my doctor again.

DOOR 6

It is suggested that 1 in 150 American children are afflicted with autism. Some have attributed the shocking increase in autism since the late 1970s to a better understanding and clearer classification of neurological disorders. Others, however, point to the use of vaccines. A preservative called thimerosal, a component of numerous vaccines, has been shown to be a major source of mercury in children, who by the time they reach the age of two have absorbed amounts of mercury exceeding established safety guidelines.

Did you know that a Japanese acetaldehyde plant owned by a company named Chisso dumped tons of mercury compounds into the Minamata Bay, leading to the poisoning of anywhere from tens of thousands to two million people, who ate fish from the bay and from the Shiranui Sea, which connects with it? Since the 1950s hundreds of Japanese have died from this mercury poisoning, others suffering impaired vision and convulsions, with mothers giving birth to twisted, deformed children. I first read about this appalling environmental disaster when I was a kid, in a copy of either Life or Look magazine belonging to my parents. I can still recall my fascinated repulsion viewing photos of the victims...stark black and white photographs, luminosity dancing with darkness, like images painted in silvery mercury on a slab of black obsidian.

Do you think the medical community and the pharmaceutical companies would ever admit to being responsible for autism in 1 out of every 150 American children? Imagine 1 out of every 150 sets of American parents filing lawsuits. Against the insurance companies, too, who I believe pressure the medical folks into using inoculations that mix various vaccines into one cocktail, to minimize office visits and thus the amount of visits these insurance companies have to pay for. The American health care system could be harming more people than it helps, says I.

Thalidomide. Lead. Asbestos. Radon. Cheeseburgers.

Formaldehyde is another component of vaccines. We are already being embalmed from the time we are infants.

Carcinogen nation. Carcinogenation. Carcinogeneration.

Says I. Says I angrily. Screams the angry pain the pain the pain in my skull.

A crashing clattering thump made me turn away from my fiftieth or so look in the mirror that night. It had come from my front porch. I whisked into the kitchen, picked up my flashlight in one hand and my claw hammer, the first weapon I spotted, in the other. Then I crept into the livingroom, where the TV was on with its volume turned low; Grover was sitting in his plastic rocking chair while a Disney video played. “Shh,” I said to him, as I tucked the hammer’s handle under my waistband and put my hand on the knob of the door to the front hall.

I barely peeled aside the shade in the front door’s little window, peering out at what I could see of the porch from this limited angle.

Even though I couldn’t see much of the porch, I realized now what the sound had been. It had happened numerous times before on windy nights; Mill Street seemed to channel the wind down its length. Once, after collecting my mail, I had seen a cloud of dust like a sandstorm blowing down the street toward me and had ducked inside with something like fear. The sound I had heard was simply one of the two white plastic chairs on the porch, having once again blown over and across the worn boards.

And tonight was particularly windy. On the news I had seen a satellite picture of a hurricane spinning and spiraling in a vortex off the coast. Its furthermost tentacles were reaching this far inland. Intermittent curtains of rain had been pelting the house, and though there seemed to be little in the air at the moment, the wind remained a consistent roar. Out there in the dark, the cell phone tower was wailing like a god in its death throes.

I was watching the sodium glow of the nearest street lamp, to see how much rain was falling through its aura of light, when something large and glittering and amorphous floated into view and wrapped itself around the telephone pole upon which the lamp was mounted. My first impression was of an immense, gelatinous ameba. A violent electric shiver crackled through me.

Then, I realized it was simply a sheet of cellophane or some other thin plastic wrap, blown along in the wind like a parachute. Embracing the pole, it continued to flutter and ripple until at last its slick pseudopods let go of the pole and the sheet was swept out of view.

I decided to brave the elements, and step out onto the porch to have a better view of the storm. To be on the safe side, since I hated to leave Grover vulnerable, I locked the door behind me, knowing I had a house key secured in my wallet.

Immediately upon stepping out onto the porch, I saw that both my white plastic chairs were still, rather remarkably, standing upright. One of them blowing over was not the sound I had heard. At this revelation, I thumbed on the switch of my flashlight, and pulled the hammer out of my waistband. My gaze narrowed with a hunter’s tension as I surveyed the black air churning all around my house.

A movement overhead drew my gaze. High above, another huge sheet of plastic film was soaring through the air. A giant, airborne jellyfish.

Unmindful of the irregular raindrops that spattered me, and my hair as it whipped across the great bulge on my forehead, I stepped down from my porch onto the sidewalk. Down toward the end of my street, where the little conference building squatted, and where Mill Street met with the road across which lay the wide parking lot, I could see the air was full of more ectoplasmic apparitions. Swimming, tumbling, quivering through the air, advancing down the street toward me.

A grim smile on my face, I gripped my hammer more firmly and began walking along the sidewalk to meet the storm of plastic. Defiantly, I pointed the beam of my flashlight into its vortex. Soon, it was all around me and above me. A membrane tried to wrap itself around my legs but I jerked out of its grasp, kicked it away, and continued onward.

By the time I had passed the conference center, and stood at the edge of the road facing the black void of the parking lot, its borders uncertain in the night, I had become a little less cocky. The plastic wrap was everywhere, more and more of it, and here I was out in the open, and suddenly a great sheet of it slammed into me and enfolded me. I wanted to shout or scream but the film was taut across my open mouth. Plastered to my mouth as if to gag me, to my nose as if to suffocate me, pressed hard against my eyelids as if to bind me. It wanted to seal me, coat me, make me into something else, a mere effigy...

Somehow, I struggled free of the jellyfish creature and I even swung the hammer at it in a mad arc but it was already racing off down Mill Street. The thing’s attack had unnerved me, awakened in me a desperate need to find shelter until the shoal of these ameba things had been swept away. Across the street I could see the somber dark shape of the brick warehouse. It was closer than my house. Almost in terror now, as more of the things whooshed past me, almost enveloping me again, I broke into a run across the road, across the parking lot to where the warehouse stood in its center like a stone castle on an island. I skidded to a stop on its cement ramp, went down on hands and knees, and scampered through the hole that had been broken open in the garage door labeled DOOR 1.

Once inside, the first thing I did was sweep my flashlight’s beam across every wall, into every corner, even across the ceiling. I saw no other people in here with me, lurking in the shadows, either hiding from the tempest themselves or waiting for me to arrive. There were no coyotes. But there were those green plastic dolls, over in the corner. I couldn’t see them from here, but I knew they were there. And after having seen Marsha, I did not wish to examine them again, did not want to imagine what they might possibly, truly be.

Instead, I remained close by the hole in the door, hunching down low again and peering out into the storm. But I shut my flashlight off, so that the plastic things would not see me in my shelter, would not rush to get inside with me...or cover the door, sealing me in here until something else might arrive.

The air was full, absolutely full of the plastic. It was like being in a bathysphere at the bottom of the ocean, gazing out into their midst.

And then, I saw distant lights shining through the plastic depths. Two small lights, like will-o’-the-wisps. Like moving stars. They were slowly bobbing in my direction. They were flashlights, two flashlights in the hands of two people calmly crossing the parking lot through the chaos of the plastic hurricane.

I was glad I had extinguished my own light. But I was not glad to be trapped, now, in this structure, even without the opening sealed over. If the two unseen individuals should come directly to the warehouse – as it appeared they would – then there was no back way out for me.

I held the hammer ready, bouncing it in the air to acclimate myself to its weight. Come on, then, I thought. Okay...come on, then.

Rain water soaked my clothes, trickled down my face. At least, I thought that was water dribbling down from the bulbous mass at my hairline. It might be more fluid weeping from the lengthening ulceration in its center, like a crack in an egg.

I watched, watched, bounced the hammer, but then I realized the flashlights were veering off, away from the warehouse, and then turning away altogether, as if returning from where they had originated. And that direction, I judged, was the access road at the far end of the parking lot.

But even after the two floating, seemingly disembodied lights had gone, I still remained inside the brick warehouse until the air began to clear of the migration of giant amebas. The wind died down a little, as if it had moved along with them, as if they generated the wind themselves, and at last I ducked through the opening in the garage door and stood in the wet air.

Like dead things, some of the sheets of film lay snagged in bushes, in trees, around more telephone poles. As I walked back home, I saw them festooning people’s hedges, shrouding their cars. But no one’s house was as shrouded as mine. When I saw it, I had to stop and stare for a few moments before I could will myself to go any closer.

My house was almost fully engulfed in the plastic membranes. My house glimmered and glistened with its new translucent skin. My house was like a huge soap bubble that at any moment might pop and disappear and take Grover along with it. Leaving me nothing. Truly, finally, nothing at all. In desperation, in fury, I charged at my house.

I snatched plastic away from the supports of my porch. I hurled myself through hanging curtains and taut webs, grabbed hold of it, balled it up, cast the balls aside, digging my way deeper. I raked the vinyl siding with the claw of my hammer, not caring if I cracked the material (it was only more plastic, after all, a plastic house) so long as I tore the ectoplasm away.

I went around the back, balling up more and more. I carried back armfuls and shoved them down into the trash bin my collection service dumped every Wednesday. I compacted them into the bin with violent downward shoves. It felt good, felt good like killing something. I thought of all the products this stuff must engulf and seal. Items brought into people’s homes. Food wrapped in this tainted, insidiously poisoned skin as invisible as the ones who dispersed it to the public...

It took quite a while. I guess I was noisy, opening up my clattering ladder and propping it against one side of my house and then another, so as to pull down the sheets adhering to the roof. I saw a few lights go on in the houses of my closest neighbors, saw a shade peel aside and a dark face framed in the yellow square, but I was too intent on removing every last scrap of the plastic tonight. It couldn’t wait until tomorrow. I didn’t want to be inside the house with that stuff clinging to it.

At last, I folded the metal ladder away. In the time it had taken me to unveil my house, the night had calmed a great deal and it had stopped raining. The clouds were even breaking up, showing the pure black of the heavens behind them. Stars sparkled there, in those torn gaps. I gazed up at them, and I saw one bright star suddenly shoot behind a patch of cloud. The star reappeared in another section of clear sky. Having zipped into this section, it then became stationary again. Not a UFO. Not an airplane. Not a star. I was not frightened, just fatalistic, knowing now that I couldn’t ever really know anything. Everything was too big, too powerful, for me to understand. I would not even try. This fatalism gave me a calm, a calm after the storm, and wearily I mounted my front steps to return inside my house. I had my key out and ready to insert into the front door when something directly before my eyes seized their attention, focused them with an almost painful jolt of the muscles that tethered them into my skull.

Yet it was only the metal number, bronze-colored, that was fixed to the front of my door below its little window. I had seen it countless times, but it was as if I were seeing it for the first time, as though it had been affixed there tonight during my absence. But it hadn’t been, of course. It was simply the number of my house. I lived at 6 Mill Street.

Still, I knew what this meant. As much as it was possible for me to know anything. Oh yes, I knew.

This was DOOR 6.

“All right,” I said to the door. Still calm. Grim smile again. “Okay.” But before I went inside, I used the claw of the hammer to pry that number off. With a savage tug, I dislodged it, and I heard it clatter down the steps behind me. Now, satisfied, I let myself inside my house.

Grover still sat obediently in front of the TV, but the movie had long ended and rewound itself. With the VCR no longer running, the TV screen showed nothing but a bright uniform blue, like the purest of cloudless skies...Grover staring contentedly into it.

DOOR 7

Then, it isn’t then. It is now, now.

Did you know that Pam and I needed to have a repair done to our car, and we took it to the dealer where we’d bought it, and to kill time while we waited we walked down the highway in search of diversion, stores to browse through, but this obscure stretch of highway had little to offer, and we walked and walked? And it was snowing lightly, and the snow that had accumulated over the night was thin but wet and clinging, it was like a glue poured over everything, it stuck to bushes that reached out toward us their branches thick with white blobs like the biggest pussy willows ever, and a man’s discarded glove at the edge of the road was coated so that it looked like a severed and bloodless hand. Further on I saw a child’s smaller glove that was only partially coated, and the blue color and flattened look of the glove made it appear like a hand of a child’s corpse blue with rot and deflated with decay, or is it better to say that the hands of corpses can sometimes look like gloves? Since corpses predate gloves we mustn’t put the horse before the cart, or the chicken before the egg. And at last we found a place that called itself a “spa”, So-and-So’s Spa, and it must have been some missing link between the drugstores of old with their soda fountains and the modern convenience store, spa apparently an archaic term because it was an archaic place, it was in a kind of time warp, we sat at the counter and ate hamburgers and drank coffee and behind the counter hung knickknacks like nail clippers and nonprescription reading glasses packaged on sun-faded cardboard with obsolete-looking art design as if this merchandise had hung there unsold since the early 1960s. And then we walked all that way back to the car dealer and later in our marriage it would have been unthinkable to spend all that time walking on gluey snow along a desolate backwoods time warped highway just for a greasy hamburger and bad coffee in a spa but it was the first year of our marriage and we held hands much of the way back and it would have been unthinkable even a few years later let alone now. And the blue glove makes me think that blue might be the color of decomposition more so than green even though green is the color we associate with rotten slimy things and even though blue is the color of the sky and the sea but green is not the color of death but of life green mold on bread and the scum on a pond are not decay but thriving life money is said to be corruption but money can make life prosper green money is the seed and the fertilizer and the crop all in one and they call money bread green with living mold fed to sea gulls clear and green hover and spin in the air on strings that go way way up so high I can’t see the fingers they’re knotted around but the puppeteer hand of God has manicured fingers and a Rolex watch and gold cufflink and a gold ring with a big green emerald.

Time warp it is no longer then it is now. “Spa” is a time warped archaic term like “American factory” like “affordable housing” like “til death do us part”. Time warped archaic book of medical curiosities with terms like “lipoma of the parietal region” and “sarcoma of the nasal septum” and “hypertrophic tumor of the scalp and face” and “epithelioma of the orbit” my tumor has now reached the size of my own head in double like a cell dividing into two like a thwarted clone of myself stillborn or am I the one who is stillborn while the tumor thrives? The mass growing from the side of my head would have tipped my head over so heavy it might have broken my neck except that it rests on my shoulder and supports itself there like a lover dozing against me.

Some of my hair grows wispily on top of the tumor like an old man’s or infant’s thin hair and some parts of the growth are as gleaming smooth as a skull and others are as wrinkled and pendulous as a scrotum and there is a long valley that was a deep furrow that turned into a fissure at first I would slip one finger into it and finally my finger broke through brittle filaments like old dried-out rubber bands and my hooked finger would draw out a stringy mass half wet and half crusted like silvery metallic snot. The next day I could fit all four of my fingers inside the fissure, all the way in. I touched more hard smooth things and wrinkly shifting things like elusive living animals inside...eels, tadpoles, jellyfish, a sharp bird beak that snipped at my fingers until I jerked them out and I haven’t slipped them inside my head cunt again. At least, while I was in there, I massaged something soft and malleable like a ball of clay, maybe my clone’s brain, and it soothed away some of the pain.

My left eye is gone in the wrinkles if I close my right eye I can see a fleshy red haze through my left eye and a silvery pus drools out of the fissure I found an old diaper of Grover’s I mean Logan’s in a drawer and I opened it up and put it over the fissure to catch the pus and I used silvery duct tape to hold the diaper in place wrapping it around a bulging section of the tumor like a tumor on the tumor and on top of another bulge I put Grover’s red baseball cap and it stays on pretty well unless I bend over but I need to find another diaper because this one is sodden and heavy. Logan would laugh and laugh when I would imitate Grover’s high-pitched scream at Kermit the Frog “Hey frog-gyyy!” and I remember the mummified frog pressed into the new tar like a fossil. Green-green frog silvery-gray duct tape silvery-gray brain snot silvery-gray company car coming slowly down the newly paved road toward me I don’t remember leaving the house or walking out this far but I must have planned maybe my clone planned because I have the stroller and things inside the stroller.

The car turns diagonally and stops with a dramatic little squeal of the brakes to cut me off but I keep walking toward it undramatic little squeals from the stroller wheels and the driver opens his door and steps out. He wears a white dress shirt without a jacket and he has dark slacks and a tie and I know his face from a murky liquid-filled room. His eyes are even more penetrating undiluted now as he walks toward me “Hold up” he says. Though he is not underwater his words sound that way as they resonate distorted in the dolphin-head dome of my tumor.

I hold up. I am smiling. He walks even closer right to the stroller. He looks down into it. Maybe I should have left the red cap on Grover’s head instead of on my tumor because he sees Grover’s blue fur sticking up from inside his too-soft baby blanket. “What the fuck is this?” he says reaching down tearing away the blanket so forcefully that Grover topples out I should have buckled Grover in what a bad father I am Grover lies on the newly paved black black tar like a crucified frog or a smashed turtle. Grover lies there. Sprawled there. And as the man kicks Grover off toward the side of the road I reach down into the stroller and pick up one of the things that was behind Grover and the man looks up from Grover and I thrust forward almost tripping over the stroller the long blade of the big knife Pam used to cut Italian and French bread which sticks him in his left eye and he doubles over slaps a palm to his socket says in his underwater voice “Uh...uh...Ga...” and he must be seeing a red haze through his left eye as I come around the stroller fast knocking it over and stick him stick him his hands flutter in flurries but I flash and dash and stick him deep deeper deepest. He falls. I kick him kick him kick him like Grover in the legs in the sternum in the gashed face and neck. The knife is all the way to the handle in the very center of his throat moving jerkily like a machine’s jammed black lever as he tries to speak fear or swallow blood or vomit the blade out his remaining eye lifts up to me drowning this time drowning at last then fixing in place.

I go to Grover scoop him in my arms I cradle him soothe him I realize his fur is matted red on blue makes purple I promise him as I tuck him into the stroller again that I will wash him when we go back home. But first I push the righted stroller around the idling silver-gray car with its opened door and its opened driver leaving them there in the middle of the road behind me. Squeak squeak squeaking little white wheels trail little trails of red.

I hope my actions and appearance don’t frighten Grogan I mean Lover but he knows not all of us monsters are bad. His favorite book is The Monster at the End of this Book which in fact is about Grover. I used to read him this story and imitate Grover’s voice and he would laugh and laugh. I hate to spoil the ending but it turns out that Grover himself is the monster at the climax of the story.

On we squeak past trees festooned with fungus lace. Through the trees snakes the stream caked with lime green scum. And I spot something set back a little in the woods I pause and see a coyote standing there gazing out at me. I am not afraid for me or Grover. The coyote is made out of crystalline green plastic. I push Logan’s stroller onward again down the straight straight access road.

Ahead the rusty chain-link gate blocking my way but open the links of rusty wire like the web of wires binding Marsha and her dog inside the shack that nurses at the huge white breast of the methane tank. The methane tank. Squeak squeak squeaking until I see the methane tank just ahead. Squeak through the gate of rust.

I lift out Grover against my chest because I have to leave the stroller here the weeds are too tall and because I need to get the other something I brought that was hidden behind Grover a red plastic jug with a yellow cap I used to mow my lawn but lately the grass in my fraction of a back yard just a single mote of the town compared to the land Odyllic covers is almost as tall as these weeds we wade through to get to the grate-like steps leading up to the shack.

I pause on the steps because I have noticed there is something missing off to the right of the methane tank. The grassless land there is so flat and even it takes me a moment to realize the nondescript plant or warehouse structure is missing gone without a trace even the dumpster stuffed with insulation and cardboard. That large a building torn down and its foundation filled in and buried as if it never even existed there even though the last time not long ago at all I slowly circled the building now vanished as if I only imagined it.

So they are trying to destroy their evidence but it is too late for that it is time for me to destroy their evidence now so I step inside the shack and I see Marsha is still there but altered.

Marsha is now only a skeleton wired to the wall she looks like a spirit she is so sheer. Her jaw is a little open somehow all the bones stay together like a skeleton wired together for a science class rusty wires that now entirely cocoon the dog on the ceiling so I can’t tell if it’s a skeleton too.

Reaching through some of the corroded wires that practically drip lockjaw I place the jug against the wall that hugs the side of the methane tank I have already unscrewed the yellow cap freed the genie vapors and stuffed in my knotted white scrap of undershirt that I soaked in the stuff before. My hand almost brushes green skeleton toes sorry Marsha so sorry.

I light the end of the rag with a cigarette lighter or match or the hate from my gaze I’m not sure how but when I turn to get out of there my ankle catches on one of those wire web strands and I fall almost dropping Grover. I scramble to my feet and out the door and down the steps the tangled weeds try to grasp hold of me but I tear through them and I have no time to retrieve the stroller I run and run with Grover but we are just short of the open gate when there is a terrific whump behind us. It throws us through the gate.

There is an ocean wave that crashes over us but it is a wave of molten lava. Somehow I jolt to my feet and resume running as if I had never been hurled down. As I run and run however I see that Grover is burning the blue hair crisping black I smother him in my arms bat at the flames but my sleeves my arms are aflame too and they just catch Grover alight again. Still as I run I pat him and slap at him as best I can ignoring the flames that fly back from my head my head a giant torch. The fluid gushing bubbling down the sides of my neck and my back is also lava from the volcano of my Olympic torch head that streams flames that are strewn like seeds to the ground behind me gobs of liquid flame catching alight the grass and weeds and brush lining the access road its new black surface reflecting sheets of rippling fire conflagration immolation.

Another concussion slaps me to the ground. In falling across Grover I snuff the rest of his flames and the blast has extinguished most of my own like a giant blowing out a candle but my head has hit the ground hard further breaking open the egg. The red cap on the tumor on my tumor and the diaper too have burned or been blown away. With yolk streaming from the shattered egg I roll onto my back to see the methane tank has not exploded like a space shuttle it is rising rising like a rocket into the sky trailing flames from its severed base. The remnants of the shack collapse carbonized into the burning weeds like the scaffold against a rocket’s side.

The tanks rises rises into the air higher and higher. Still it does not explode even as it ascends so high that I can no longer make out the metal tank just its comet trail of white glaring fire. The fire lifts into the blue blue heavens where it hangs stationary until the blue of the sky swallows it from view but I know there will be a new star in space tonight.

Though the tank did not detonate the fire is spreading across the ground into the woods. I am sorry for the animals of the forest especially when I hear their ear-splitting chorus of high-pitched screams but then I realize what I’m hearing is the fungus giant as it catches fire each burnt strand as it is severed from the rest of the web becomes a cross section a tiny screaming mouth all shrieking in unison as they blacken shrivel die. The green scum on the stream becomes a ribbon of autumn colors. The plastic coyote starts to drip and melt like a green-dyed ice sculpture. I am running again I don’t recall getting to my feet but Grover and I leave black snowflakes of ash wafting in our wake.

A roaring sound a tortured dinosaur I turn my head and see a train is barreling backwards down the tracks on fire another metal comet and it only spreads more of the flame across the outer grounds of the Odyllic property as it dwindles in the direction of town. There is so much flame now everywhere around us but we’re safe on the newly paved road though its edges melt into running tar we are running through a tunnel of flame knowing that the flame storm will reach the buildings alongside the tracks further ahead and sparks will be borne aloft and rain on the roofs of more warehouses and plant structures. One factory complex building after another will ignite like a string of firecrackers.

We hear the silvery-gray car explode behind us the access road isn’t so safe after all is being consumed swallowed up the blaze sucking away all the oxygen in the air but we have reached the start of the road by now and see that the tufts of weeds growing through cracks in the wide parking lot are bright flares the wooden garage door of the brick warehouse is burning. I hope there is a man another man floating in fluid in the little conference building right now even though it is still day because I want him to boil in it like a lobster.

I run and run down Mill Street with Grover in my arms until ahead I see our little house with its porch the locusts of sparks the plague of fire haven’t spread this far they won’t reach these residential houses. As I pass them I see people standing in open doorways and I want to yell “Fire! Fire!” to warn them and to cause them to cheer but they can already see it for themselves and also I find I can not emit anything more than a crackling gurgle from my charred throat. So I run on and on until I stumble almost tripping up the steps of 6 Mill Street. And then Grover and I are inside.

We are back home.

Grover is blackened, but his plastic eyes still glow white in his face he is still smiling. My clothes are burnt away or melded with my skin resembling the bark of scorched trees. I stagger and lurch into my bathroom to look in the mirror resting Grover down on the toilet cover first.

In the silvered glass I study my face and the tumor that gapes broken open. I stare at that deep wide fissure. I stare down into its black well depths both frightening and inviting. Silvery pus oozes out of it and trickles of hot blood from lesser cracks. I dip my finger into one of the dribbles of blood. I have to write the words carefully. I am looking in a mirror after all and I don’t want to write the words backwards.

Satisfied I reach both my hands to the lips of the wound and urge them further apart tears filling my good eye from the pain blurring my cyclops vision I pry the opening wider wider until I can slide one of my crusty black hands inside to the depth of my wrist burrow within slipping between wet slick things like the organs in a dissected woman’s belly. Something slithers against my hand. Something feebly takes hold of one of my fingers. I find the source of the squirming movement inside my head and start to drag it out I begin to scream to scream the squirming thing is pulled out of the stretched hole in my tumor elastic connective strands of silvery mucus break and now it is the slippery object coated in slime wriggling in both my hands that begins to scream and scream. But these are good screams screams of new life. Gradually we both stop screaming.

I clutch the brain no it is an infant to my chest. Its flesh is as pink and healthy as mine is blackened and cracked. Cradling the baby in one arm I turn and lift Grover into my other arm. “Here,” I say to Logan choked with emotion. “I kept him for you...”

Outside I hear one booming detonation after another as though planes are dropping bombs. I hear the sound of felled tree crashing as each cell phone tower topples the screech of their metal like thousands of remembered trapped phone voices of lovers and haters promises and pleas released at once let go like painful memories. I feel the wooden floor quake beneath my feet when the giant God-cock smokestack the tallest structure in town collapses under itself in a deluge of bricks. I want to collapse too but I lean my hip against the edge of the sink to keep myself up I must not sink down I must hear the apocalypse. I hear sirens that approach too late to stop the purging elemental forces flames as pure as the air of heaven.

Logan Grover and I stand in the bright white heaven of my bathroom in a single embrace. I grin at us in the cool celestial fountain of the medicine cabinet mirror and there I read again the words painted backwards in my own blood above the opening in my head the words that read: DOOR 7.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections PUNKTOWN, VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN, PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and GHOSTS OF PUNKTOWN. Novels in that setting include DEADSTOCK, BLUE WAR, MONSTROCITY, HEALTH AGENT, EVERYBODY SCREAM!, and RED CELLS. Thomas's other short story collections include WORSHIP THE NIGHT, THIRTEEN SPECIMENS, NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS, DOOMSDAYS, TERROR INCOGNITA, UNHOLY DIMENSIONS, AAAIIIEEE!!!, HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD, and ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN (with W. H. Pugmire). His other novels include LETTERS FROM HADES, THE FALL OF HADES, BEAUTIFUL HELL, BONELAND, BEYOND THE DOOR, THOUGHT FORMS, SUBJECT 11, LOST IN DARKNESS, THE SEA OF FLESH AND ASH (with his brother, Scott Thomas), BLOOD SOCIETY, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.