Hotel Room (Unfinished)

The hotel room was brightly lit. She cut an imposing figure in her black dress. I set down my briefcase. We hadn’t seen each other in many years.

“I’ll tell you. You sure have changed since the last time.”

I had. I was fat and bald and not very good looking anymore. She seemed not to have put on much weight, but she was always heavy, and her flesh had that same doughy color that was always a slight turn-off.

“I’ve got a ring here. It’s got my name on it. See?”

She held it up. It caught the light like a glittering star. What was I doing here?

“The days pass so quickly now. They drop like little tears into the ocean of time.”

“That metaphor is…trite.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a fucker and always have been. It’s why you left.”

“I left because I couldn’t deal with you anymore. The mental and emotional torment became overwhelming. Mind-numbing. Too much for me.”

“Yeah, poor little you. Always so lost and alone.”

“It’s what I was born to.”

“That’s not quite right, though, is it Null? You had your chance and blew it. That’s why you’ve come back to me. So we can die together again, for one more night.”

“Your poetic sentiments are lost on me.”

“Your cynicism is always so poignant. Now, come here and kiss me.”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be near her. I remembered a time, not long ago, when the whole world seemed to revolve around the two of us. Our little Kingdom of Shit.

Dead flies blowing in a hot breeze. Two souls trapped in a tiresome game. All the screaming, all the empty, lonely moments we tried to fill with fleeting, happy memories.

I looked up. She was slipping out of her dress. She looked heavy, gravid. I wondered if she was going to give birth.

Someone wrote to me, “…you’re walking along, and suddenly you fall into her vagina.” I have no idea why they penned that, but it rang true all of a sudden. I had been with other women, of course, had slinked through the scum of spit and sweat and skin until I felt I was finally satisfied. But nothing had ever seemed right; I was still alone.

“I want to tell you about something,” she said, slipping off her bra. Her breasts were heavy, pendulous globes, punctuated by large nipples. I felt nothing. I was as stale and empty as the bitter funk from an old room.
“I had a dream,” she said, her eyes frosting over as she unwrapped from the cocoon of her clothing.

“I had a dream, and I think it means something.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “just what do you think it means?”

She slid out of her skirt. Her pubic hair was a wild tuft of red between doughy, pale thighs, too flabby and as unappealing as anything I had ever seen. I could imagine the musty odor of her womanhood. (Vagina, let’s be clinical, shall we?)

“I’m not sure. In the dream, you were at your grandmother’s house. The one who is dead. And the rest of your family were gathered there. All of them were getting ready to eat, except for you. It was like you weren’t allowed to eat with them. You were busy slaving away in the kitchen, preparing a great pot of food. The pot had a number of strange, what seemed like pipes emerging from it. I still don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Was there any more?”

“Yes. That dream segued into another.”

But I already knew what she was going to describe.
***
The sheriff was a stout man in a tan uniform. He had a moustache and a gut. He walked with assurance around the yard.

It was a hot summer day. I was standing just over his shoulder, staring down at two groups of scruffy-looking teenagers. One group was lined up against a car. The leader of the group (or the boy who seemed the leader), sat with a wide grin on his thin, angular face. They looked like the collective members of the Manson Family.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew it wasn’t good. The sheriff put his fists on his hips and strutted around. I wondered if he was going to call for backup.

One group of teens was pressed up against the bumper of a car on cinder blocks. It was a collection of boys and girls, although it seemed like more girls. Giggling skanks, teenage tramps. All of them seemed to be dressed in dark shades of old, unwashed clothing, worn at the knees and elbows.

Another group of teens was sitting in a row to the side of them. They seemed a lot more glum, disinterested. One of them had a beard. I don’t recall mucha bout them. I recall it was a bright day, that the house we were all standing in front of was very old. The lawn was overgrown with clumps of weed, and I could feel sweat prickling my brow.

I was already familiar with the sheriff and how he did things. Three kids, one of them a little man with two black eyes, all gathered around a table. The coke is there, cut into lines, and the little man traces the shape of a dollar bill in the coke. The sheriff is taunting them with the stuff.

He takes a girl by the wrists, drags her into the next room. It is dark, a living room. He opens a drawer, pulls out a plastic bag fill of pills, waves it under her nose. She struggles against him and cries. I was sitting with them at the table, just behind the sheriff’s left shoulder.

I am the sheriff’s bleeding over-soul, apparently.

A drive down a lonely street terminates in death. The sheriff will never relent. He is driven and apocalyptic, a killing-machine of icy, brutal hate, driven just past the point where frenzy is masked by a cold, thin veneer of sanity.

***
I look up from my reverie. A mountain of flab is pressing her cold flesh down on me, I am being raped by the cellulite-riddled body of my ex-wife.

I am pinned like a fly beneath the mandibles of a hungry spider. Vagina dentate; the sex that castrates. My mind reels. She is pressing the breath out of me. Did I want this?

Bitterly my mind races toward thoughts of last night. I was drunk at the bar, trying to keep close tabs on my friend. I was drunk, but he was even more drunk. He was stumbling around, making a nuisance of himself, breathing beer and stale air on whomever he could lean for a moment. Finally, I panicked when I saw him lie down in a booth. I knew he was going to pass out, and I couldn’t very well carry him out.

I remember stumbling over to the booth and grabbing him by the feet. I pulled. I tried to wake him up. It seemed pointless.
***

Three days earlier I had been a grandmother’s house with my mother, cleaning out an old closet. Grandmother was dead, but there was some final tidying-up to accomplish. Mother pulled out an old umbrella shook it, said, “Well, this is all that’s left. She’s gone now.”

Amazingly, droplets of water seemed to fly off the end of the old umbrella. Mom’s eyes went wide in amazement.

“How could that be? It’s like the thing’s been recently used!”

I didn’t know how to answer, but I had to go to the bathroom. I went in and stood by the bathtub. At first, I thought there were lobsters floating in the water. Then I did a double take.

They were ginat, mutated spiders…

…this is all I can remember.

A Tale of Wabbits

The following is a tale about wabbits, and wolves. Many years ago, a man stalked and killed a wabbit as if he were a wolf, and then fell into a deep sleep. Some of us spend our lives in a deep sleep, but the man was roused upon occasion, his bestial hunger crawling upward into his belly until his black heart told him it was time, once again, to go and get another wabbit.

I’m not a wolf.

I’m a teacher.
***
The man turned to me, his eyes glowing like twin coals, and said, “Null, it’s time to go.”

I stepped off the platform. Everything is so white here; in this place the walls seem to glow from within, casting their light outward so that shadows can’t lurk in the corners of the room. There are no crawling shadows here, no dark and ready nightmares creeping about on twisted feet to haunt the darkness, because there is no darkness. Even the clothing is shimmering and white, radiant with the love and peace I feel all around me, and I say, “I don’t want to go,” but he just smiles, and his face is a vast plain of understanding and somewhere, written into the pattern of the stars, I know that all things are meant to be.

“The Knowing Self is not born; it never dies. It sprang from nothing, nothing sprang from it.”

His mouth makes the words, but I hear them like an echo in my head, rumbling around with a mythic resonance until they penetrate the core of my brain, and I hang my head in submission and realize that, yes, I will have to transport down, despite the good time I am having here, amidst the rainbow light that shines and shines and comes from everywhere and nowhere. So I take on a new physical form, and then I am lead to that shifting screen wherein visions pop in and out of your mind like glowing fireworks, and laser lights penetrate your eyes, and you can peer into the darkness of secret spaces and nothing can hurt you because you are surrounded by the good vibrations emitted, by the humming and thrilling of the mother ship as it counts off parsecs in intergalactic oblivion.

***

The Wolf prowled the streets in darkness, looking for his prey. She was walking to a convenience store to buy a pop. The streets were deserted, the parking lot a ghost town of rusted, shit cars and dead bugs, candy wrappers and old bottles tossed aside; so much refuse. But there was something fundamentally wrong here. There was some sort of center of psychic gravity, some sort of dimensional whirlpool that puked up the sullen denizens of another reality, in all their strange and gruesome savor faire.

As in one time I saw a man with funny legs, walking like a drunken flying saucer captain…Now, one should never tease the crippled, but I wasn’t sure that that was what he even was as I stood at the checkout of the supermarket line (which was right next door to the convenience store), and he came crab-walking up the aisle, holding a single yellow flower out in front of him like it was a sacred chalice; and he was a skinny, sweaty, oily white man, who was tall and gangly but had legs like a crab, and a sort of plaid shirt and shorts, and he was wearing the thickest glasses I have ever seen with tape on them. And he had a shock of hair more like an afro. And heavy breathing; you could hear him coming up the aisle, gasping as if he were having a really bad asthma attack. But no attack. This must have been normal for him.

The sight of him shocked me (but not as much as other things would shock me in due time), and I inched away from him as he crab-walked to the register with his single flower and purchased it. What did he want with one lousy flower? To take it back to his home planet?

(So that area of town acts as some sort of sinister magnet, attracting in things BEST LEFT UNKNOWN to the prying eyes of mortal man. But it is a dull, dry, empty little shopping center on the edge of a long country road, leading away from a college.)

When he killed the girl, it was a real freak scene. Had driven up next to her in his van, and had eyed her with that wolfish, knowing look. He was a Wolf, alright, and she was a Rabbit, and it was dark and the moon was howling and his blood was up. Rabbit was tasty and good. Rabbit was good meat. He felt his heart skip a beat.

“Hey baby? Hey, bitch, I’m talkin’ to you.”

The girl continued to walk, her blood pressure increasing; sudden panic erupted in white hot spots of terror across her face, blotches of icy blood rushing to her cheeks. Her hair whipped about in the gentle breeze as she quickened her pace.

“Hey, you want a ride?” It was a lame growl for a wolf of his caliber, but it was the best his lust-addled mind could conjure. He drove slowly, pacing her, she taking off across a field between a swimming pool and a park.

Suddenly the beast leapt up in his soul, the Wolf released itself, and was suddenly hairy and growling and leaping and running after the kill. The Kill. All that mattered to the animal.

He chased after her, cornered her against a wall, pinned her against a tree. He could hear her heart hammer in her chest, as her breath sucked in…out…in…out…Was she consciously trying to control her panic? He wasn’t sure. She suddenly screamed, and he dealt her a crushing blow.

“Don’t do that again,” he said calmly, producing a buck knife. “Now, take off your clothes.”

She started to unbutton her shirt. The Wolf felt himself go rigid with excitement and lust. He was nearly salivating. It would all be over so soon, but, oh, it would be so sweet to the Wolf.

He could barely see her in the moonlight. Small. Waif-like, almost. A good girl. Mommy’s little angel. Daddy’s little darling. She stood, like a shock-trauma victim, bathed silver in the coursing moonlight.

The cicadas sang a pretty song. The night was a rumbling fart of cars plunging to various destinations in the distance. Somewhere, he fancied he could hear the chatter from a radio.

She stood in confusion, her arms held stiffly out in bleak repose, as if to say, “This is what you wanted. This is what you wanted to see? Can you be satisfied now? Can you let me go, and let me live? Oh, I so badly want to live, and to love, and to grow old, and to see the other wabbits again, all snug and comfortable in our little cage.”

Her eyes were twin moon of exquisite religious suffering. Somewhere, he knew, angels were weeping tears of blood.

He couldn’t kill her here. He had to find another location. It was too early, there wasn’t enough time, someone might happen upon them in the darkness. It excited him though, the possibility of capture. It thrilled him almost as much as the hunt and capture of the prey.

Suddenly, the strange suspended animation they both stood in was broken by one swift movement of his dirty hand. He brought it down with crushing force against the side of her head, knocking her unconscious.

He dragged her back to the van. How he did this without anyone seeing him, across a lighted road so early in the evening, is anyone’s guess. He managed. He left the clothes behind, Later, the police would find them, but that was all.

No blood. No DNA. No fingerprints. A perfect kill. The Wolf was pleased with his swift cunning. He wrapped her up in a plastic tarp, stuffed her in the back of his van amidst the filth and the shit, the porno mags and the dirty underwear and the whatnots and candy wrappers and potato chip bags. The Wolf had a big appetite.

He drove down the road a pace, but he turned off onto the back roads, which he knew well. He was looking for a specific isolated spot, somewhere far out, where he could work unhampered and undiscovered for as long as it would take.

He found his spot amidst a stand of thick trees, overlooking a river. We could say the spot was romantic, but we would be lying. Of course, a special relationship must exist, after a fashion, between the Predator and his Prey. A certain dance of death is enacted, a ritual performed, a life spent.

He dragged her out of the van. She was coming to. He leaned her against a tree as she moved groggily in the chill night air. She made a moaning sound in her throat. He crouched down for a moment, to hear if she might say something.

She never spoke a word he could understand. He knocked her back against the rough bark, pinned her there with one hand, and got out his belt.

It was a long strip of leather he kept for just such purposes. He began to wind it around her neck, around the slim tree trunk, tightening it, leaning back against it, as her hands shot up to her throat. She struggled, but her eyes told him she knew the game was up. There was a certain resignation that only he could see; it was a dead, vapid light in the eye, one that said that Heaven’s gate would soon be opening to claim another wayward soul, sent too young to walk the streets of gold.

Finally it was all over. He released his grip on the belt, the blood coursing in his veins, his sex sliding down his leg in a hot stream. He gasped, shuddered, felt the incredible ecstasy, wondered what it would be like to eat the body, to keep it with you forever in a sense, and then thought that that was impossible. He wasn’t, after all, Jeffrey Dahmer.

He dumped her. He never told the police where. To this day, she has never been seen again.

***

But it is a tough world. Someone’s father reminds him, holding out an old rifle and dressed in green fatigues, that the military wants his service. The son doesn’t want to go, wants to wrestle the father to the ground to prove, once and for all, that he isn’t going to take any shit and didn’t steal the clip of money that was laying on grandma’s table (grandma at this point, is not dead in her grave, I suppose, but still alive, and gathered with the family, and pointing an accusing finger at our young hero.)

“You want to know who manufactured the best airplanes during the war? The Americans, of course. We did. That’s why we beat the Germans. The Nazis.”

The father sits down, crosses his legs, looks reflective. Somewhere, the boy remembers better times.

He is with his mother in a fantasy of the movies. They are watching an old black-and-white flick on the screen. It apparently stars Danny Kaye.

The mother is morbidly obese. The boy knows that, just as sure as his father will one day drop dead from stress, so too will his mother succumb to a heart attack because of her obesity. She tells him, “Go up to the snack bar and get me some chili cheese fries.” He does what he is told, a dutiful son.

(Of course, I see all this through the shifting prism of the viewer, and it is all like little images suddenly grown big from multicolored prisms and shining jewels, and little lasers that blast strange, warped sounds that shatter the nerves and the ears. And suddenly, I realize I am beaming down with the Away Team.)

They are all teachers–WE are all teachers, I should say. But the kids think we are some kind of hunchbacked, fairy tale goblins, or at least, as frequency fields shift, they catch a glimpse of something like that. A hook-nosed, wart-encrusted little troll with long, skinny fingers, who terrifies little chillins, and most likely, eats rabbits. Wabbits, I forgot.

But we have a job to do, and the Head Teacher takes us over to the Wabbit cage, and it is a pen with a few sick bunnies in it, losing their fur in clumps. And I can see why; it’s filthy.

“Hasn’t been cleaned in awhile,” said the Head Teacher. “If the rabbits start to die we cart them away. Turn them into meat glue.”

“You mean, they are eaten?”

“Everything in nature is, eventually,” said the Head Teacher, and turned to walk away. I didn’t ask her what she meant by this, but went to work.

At first, I thought that someone had left a hose running, because the ground was a quagmire of pure sludge. The heavy posts holding up the cage were sinking into the mire, and my feet were also sinking. I opened up the cage with trembling hands. Inside, a dying bunny lay on its side, its little bunny ass bare of fur, and it looked sick as all hell, and I tried to scoop handfuls of bunny shit out of the cage, but the mud and filth surrounding it were making it impossible. Flies began to dot to and fro on my face, and rivulets of sweat poured down my cheeks. I could feel myself drowning in swampy stink.

In my back pocket was a copy of the Necronomicon. I don’t remember when I was given this or why, but sure enough, it was there. Piss-elegant and black, with a weird sigil on the front cover.

I, at least, had heavy gloves on. My buddy came over to me.

“How ya doing?”

“Not so good,” I said. “And this is gonna get ruined if I’m not careful.” I tossed the book up to him. The laughter of little children screeched like a cacophonous music around me, as the silent breeze blew stink up my nostrils. More handfuls of bunny shit. A corpse. Another dead bunny.

Everything in nature is eaten, eventually.

The Red Death held sway over all.

I shoveled bunny shit.

Years ago, I had dreamt the Wolf. I had seen him, big as life, pulling my underage ass off a bicycle and stuffing me in the trunk of a car. I had shot up from bed screaming, the image of being entombed in an automobile trunk still lingering in my nightmare consciousness. I had seen that mountainous frame, that stone-hardened visage, the scrubby chin…

Years later I would see the same face in the newspaper, on the internet, in sleazy true-crime paperbacks. The eyes are always cold flint, the jaw set firm, the soul given over to Satan and the way of all flesh.

Did her face freeze in terror, like some snapshot of a tortured goddess, in the pale moments before she knew the agony of her own death? Did the both of them form a macabre ballet, a lover’s tryst of absurd and gothic proportions, as his huge hands wrapped leather garrote around her throat like a ribbon of killing beauty? Did Mary Kelly know the precise geometric angles that her own corpse would come to repose in, moments after Jack the Ripper had left her a butchered rag? Are such mathematics quantified by God, or is the Law of the Universe one of random chance, blood spattering where it may, flesh and grue falling, without care or toil, through empty shadows of meaningless time?

Or is this all just bullshit?

I don’t know. Around me, children scream. The Wolf is a character in a fairy tale. I shovel rabbit shit on the deck of the intergalactic freighter EDX. It’s safer up here, and much more sane.

THEY…are vegetarians.

I Was Born from the Cat’s Vagina

So I am with this teacher, and we are both confined to the Special Ed room. Now, you know how this goes, two people in a human bird cage (and man, I mean a literal fucking cage: walls ad floor are bendable metal slats with a tarp or rug covering it), and somehow or other we get tasked with motivating a blonde boy with a bad speech impediment. Teenage punk talks like he has a mouth full of rocks, or is part cave man, or some damn thing. But there is a second room, off from the first, and this is where they keep the real retardates: drooling hydrocephalic in wheelchairs, and the deformed, and Down Syndrome cases what got no more than an ability to flap their arms like a penguin and howl.

But, our room, our domain, is just for BAD KIDS. I guess I was a bad kid that year. Many years after, also, most probably. But somehow or other I got on the good side of the law, and they let me have a little responsibility, like I am some sort of shining light, right? An example for the ages. An example for all the other BAD KIDS.

We go in the second room, walking carefully over those flimsy metal slats, and right away I smell that pissy odor clings to everything so funky and nasty, everything having to do with the mentally handicapped (the politically correct will call me a bigot, but I bet their sweet aunt’s fannies they’ve never been subjected to such a smell in all their born days), and I know where I’m at.

There is a bed sits in the center of the floor, a and reclining on it, covers pulled up to his chin, is Our Boy. He has a bad blonde cut, and a heavy jaw, and his clothes come straight from Goodwill, but at least he’s wearing some.

“Get up. Get on up,” says the fat woman teacher. “You belong next door. Not in here. This is for the Special Needs kids.”

He mumbles something in a hollow, weird voice that I can’t quite make out. But he is smiling. He knows we’re powerless to do anything to move him, and he looks pretty comfortable, if not entirely clean. I don’t know what to say. I put my hands on my hips. Then I realize something funny.

The bed he is resting on is made of those same damnable metal bars, and looks pretty damn uncomfortable. I can hear it groan and creak and crush under his weight as he turns over. He peeps an eye at us mischievously, and then screws both lids shut again, as if he is trying hard to get back to whatever dismal little dream he was having before we so rudely interrupted. I think maybe he is dreaming about how much fun he is having getting over on The System.

The System likes me, so it was with an amount of aplomb that I was chosen to meet the President, who was an amiable old B-movie actor that played opposite a chimpanzee. This was long ago, and the man has passed on to greener pastures. But I got to go to the White House screening room, where a famous director with connections to the CIA showed his most popular film.

It was a blockbuster about kids and an alien stranded on Earth. I couldn’t remember exactly how the thing went or ended, and, as I sat there amid the rows of suits and the high, cloying stink of aftershave, I realized that it was because, for some reason, they had changed the ending. Now, about halfway through, it became an entirely different movie.

(This sort of thing has happened to me before, and I always find it perplexing.)

Now, instead of the bicycle ride in the sky, accompanied by squat green alien in a basket, the kids were flying Black Hawk helicopters (maybe the President liked this version of events better?), and calling each other funny nicknames over the radio. Names that had to do with different varieties of fruit, I think. I can’t remember specifically.

I wondered where in the hell those kids learned to fly those helicopters.

And we never did get to see the alien. I so badly wanted to see the alien. But we just saw a bunch of flying over canyons, and I started to fall asleep, and the President was standing there nudging me, calling me “little fella,” and the famous director (who was a Jewish guy with a beard and a baseball cap) was standing there beaming with kindly eyes, but the President looked a little scary.

He had a bad shave, I can remember. He had a cruel, inscrutable face, face of a robot, a mechanical sort of smile that said, “Don’t come to me with your petty concerns and trivialities. I could blow up the world twenty times if I wanted to. You think I am interested in your outmoded politics? I am not interested at all.”

He held up a hand. He had four fingers. Was missing a thumb.

“You know,” he said, “there aren’t four people in this room who know how true that movie really is.” The director smiled, laughed a little, looked nervous. I fidgeted in my seat. Men in suits with black sunglasses changed positions. Outside, Washington slept the sleep of the righteous.

I was flown back home. My home town took pictures of me, had a parade, and I ended up getting my name in the paper. But it all went terribly wrong somehow.

I knew there was more to this “alien” business than what the President was letting on. And the director of the movie must have been in on it, too, because, just then, the aliens started to invade my life, little by little.

Okay, so we didn’t have a dog. I couldn’t figure out where the hell the dog had come from, but one day I wake up, and there the little bitch is. Outside, storm clouds are gathering, and I get out of bed, go downstairs, and Mom is sitting in her broken recliner, watching the weather map. It looks like there is a hurricane on the way. She looks pretty scared, and I look down to realize that that isn’t a dog I’ve been trailing across the living room floor, it’s a cat. A sleek little pussy. She reclines on her side.

“You guys don’t love me anymore,” she purrs.

I bend over, reach my hand out, stroke the soft fur.

“Oh we sure do love you, Mr. Pussycat. We love you like a member of our own little family.”

“Oh no you don’t, you big liar! You guys are planning on getting rid of me.” The cat had a whiny, little bitch voice. I wasn’t at all shocked she should be so petulant. Outside, the wind began to grow to an enormous howl, and the lights flickered.

I then saw that the cat’s fur was turning red. Bright red.

The lights dimmed as the hurricane-force gale picked up, and Mom jumped from her seat, but the cat was already clawing at my head, and enveloping me with her cat womanhood. Her pussy’s pussy. I had an instantaneous image of being born, a whole man, from the red, gaping cunt of a large, red-headed woman with pale skin. Had the cat metamorphosed, like Gregor Samsa, into a redheaded harlot floating in an indeterminate space?

Null is confused. This “born-again” routine is for the birds; messy, and once was enough, thank you very much.

But I was born from the cat’s vagina. Or reborn. Or some damn thing. Later, I went back to the library, possibly to research cat’s and their peculiar birth canals. I had been here previously, looking for a lost edition of Steinbeck. The librarian pointed out to me that they had an obscure work by Victor Hugo that demanded I read it.

The text was in little columns. Right side up and upside down. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. Luckily, a re-enactor was there to make some sense of it. Or to show a movie, or to pick apart my brain as I settled into a hard plastic seat and listened to him.

He was dressed in Medieval robes, a tin crown, and his hair covered his face.

“Crossing oneself is NOT a sure way to expiate sin. Nor is saying the Hail Mary or Our Father.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Next to him, a television screen shows the image of a hunchback racing through the streets of Paris, trying desperately to save, in the nick of time, some doomed Esmeralda who is tied to the stake amidst a pile of ash. Below her, someone has set up a cannon aimed at her face.

It fires, but some sort of reverse magnetism must have been at work, because the shot is deflected and falls back to Earth. I wonder, as I sit there watching this absurdity, why it was that Pierre ran away with the goat, right when he knew that Esmeralda needed him the most, and whether or not the Sachette ever had a chance to brush her teeth while she languished in that public dungeon.

Perhaps Pierre, too, was reborn from an animal’s womb. Perhaps we should all crawl back into the skin of some shape-shifting dog or kitten, or goat, and experience the world from the inside out, as we travel, screaming, through the darkened tunnel of delirium into the bright, brutal pain of the New Day.

The movie ended with a woman, whose face was stretched into a rictus of insanity, racing up the stone steps of an old keep with her arms outstretched. She is laughing in terror, and, outside; you see that a legion of soldiers has the place surrounded. They are going to capture her.

Her protector passes her on the staircase. The jig is up. Later, he is shown walking to the “burning place,” a look of disgust on his face at the stench and smoke wafting up from the fire. It could be 1568.

I wonder if she kept a familiar? I wonder if it was a kitty cat?

Frozen Tuba Clitoris

I’m sneaking through the library, looking for a lost Steinbeck.

I know it’s here somewhere, hidden on these esoteric old shelves, a worm-eaten old thing with crumbling pages and a seductive orange skin.

Yesterday we talked about Malcolm X in the classroom, while I chewed on a bundle of rubber worms. Not that they tasted like potato chips. I spit up violently, but the lecture went on and on.

It must have been a conspiracy.

Three shots for Kennedy. I don’t know how many for Malcolm X, but his relative, who was giving the lecture, looked uncomfortable. I wonder if it was because, sometime earlier, a troop of German youths had lead everyone in a rousing chorus of the “Horst Wesel Lied,” while my soul languished in frozen tuba clitoris of Triumph of the Will.

But yesterday was a dream of pirates, as I scribbled nonsensical in my little book, remembering other lives lived in spaces between. Phantom images of 17th Century ghost ships and maniacal captains, making captives swim the cement channel above deck (but how can THIS be?), and me with a blonde-headed, pigtailed girl who couldn’t swim, old-time dress billowing in the filthy scum water as her head bobbed down glug, glug.

“Just don’t think about it, and you can make it.” But she never did, and died.

But the librarian assures me they have had the book before. It must have vanished. It must have taken up legs and walked away. She leads me over to a stack of books with garish covers–comic book books. I don’t read ‘em. I want the Steinbeck, and I mean to get it.

Finally, I see they have hidden it from me on the other side of the shelf, amidst a collection of books that are, somehow, all wrong. I take it carefully in my hands, not liking the weight of it, or the smell, and slip it under my jacket. Then, when the old battle axe has her back turned, I slip out into the hallway, to make my escape.

I creep carefully, so carefully, down the hallways, turning left, right, left. Suddenly, I spy a pair of double doors. I walk toward the double doors, my prize under my arm, and carefully crack them open to see inside.

Inside is a woman I’ve had sexual relations with. Her back is turned to me, and she is grown immensely fat. A clothesline stretches from one end of the room to the other. She is hanging up dripping sheets in her underwear. She’s a meter at the hips, at least.

I sneak back out of the room, suddenly shocked, wanting to avoid her at all costs. If she sees me, I am a dead man; I might as well hang this caper out to dry, like dirty laundry.

I finally make it outside to the stone stairway. Outside, a getaway car is raring and ready to go. Standing outside the car is the chauffeur, who I recognize as being my tall, fat, frizzy-haired uncle, who is curly and grey.

I know him well. He died years ago.

We beat a retreat. Apparently, he takes me back to the school, where we study piano for a little while. I play an old tune by Anton LaVey, while a young man comes in, looks at the keyboard as if he is about to be angry, and then I realize that they keys are falling out like rotten teeth beneath my fingers.

Somehow, though, my project is changed on me. (And just why the hell DID I need that enigmatic Steinbeck, an edition I had never seen before?) I am now digitizing a painting, entering it into a computer program, where the screen demands you fill in certain fields of information, although I can’t make heads or tails out of any of it.

The painting is one I did long ago, called “Desert Angel”–a sort of nod at Fellini and all women who appear, mysterious as outer space revenants, in the midst of our forlorn wanderings.

Flowers bloom pale and beautiful under the arc of the waning moon. I stand exultant. I Live.

“Damn you Null, you’ve wandered off the road again.”

I do that.

Graveyard Madonna

I once knew a female who moved into the apartment next door to me. She was a short, butch little thing, and she didn’t like living in the disgusting, L-shaped building any more than I did. Don’t remember her name. Suppose it isn’t really important.

I remember the day she moved in, though, standing out on the sun-baked lawn and watching her walk down the road, a lonely figure, edged over into the gravel by cars blowing past at full speed. I knew where she was headed. It’s where everyone seems to end up; the cemetery.

Now, she told me later, “I walked on up the road a piece, and was feeling dusty and thirsty, but sure as hell forgot all about it as soon as I saw that big iron gate. It looked like something out of the last century, something out of a nightmare. I couldn’t help myself, I had to go inside.

“Once inside, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was no run-to-riot old bone yard; this place had been cared for and maintained. And it was huge! Huge marble fountains, and huge monuments, and in the center of it all that statue. The one that weeps and comes to life.”

“Graveyard Madonna?”

She shook her head in the affirmative.

“I saw her come to life that day. Yeah. I took one look at that statue, and it looked like tears were coursing down her cheeks. I looked behind me suddenly, back at the gates, and I could see a shrouded grey figure, the figure of a woman, hurrying out. It had to be her. It was so ghostly. It really gave me the creeps.”

“Why does she leave?” I wondered.

“I don’t know,” answered the girl. “Perhaps she goes in search of blood.”

***

I was certainly in search of something that year. Walking around outside the school, I was approached by a reporter for the student paper who asked me something about rock ‘n’ roll.

“Sorry fellow,” I said, a little arrogantly, “only thing I listen to is noise.”

Across the street was an apple-cheeked boy that could have been Tom Sawyer. I immediately felt compelled to cross and talk with him, as I knew, like myself, he was on an adventurer’s quest to find SOMETHING of value and purpose in this purposeless life. Or, at least, he had been called by God, and such folks always stand out to the nth. I crossed, said, “Where you headed to?”

He looked sheepish, or maybe embarrassed, and stuck his hands in his overall pockets, and said, “No place in particular, but I know this old, weed-choked path. Might lead somewhere. You headed out?”

I indeed affirmed that I was “headed out.” Town wasn’t big enough for me anymore. I could feel the pressure of the minutes falling on my head like the pounding of a hammer. And where did I belong in it all? Nowhere. Just another lonely wanderer. Indeed.

“Let’s go then. Not sure where we’re gonna end up.”

“Ain’t it more exciting that way?”

“Sure.”

“You been around here long?”

“Long as I can remember.”

“Me, I can’t remember a time I wasn’t around here. Seems like I been wandering these streets and through these lonely old buildings every day, day in and day out, trying to figure out what it all means. What does it all mean? You have any idea?”

“No. wish I did. I’m orphaned every bit as much as you are. Only difference being, I got up this morning and knew, somehow, that things could be different.”

“They can be. We just have to follow that old Yellow Brick Road, just like in the movie.”

The road wasn’t made of yellow bricks, damn sure of that. The sidewalk became an overgrown forest, and on either side gnarled and evil trees bent their devilish fingers to block the sun, which penetrated in bright little beams, and dapples, and pools of shifting light. We had observed on the cracked pavement a series of hopscotch lines. No big surprise. They looked as if they had been etched in chalk.

These gave way to more arcane symbols. I couldn’t fathom them; they were the kiddy equivalent of Egyptian hieroglyphics. They seemed to tell a story of an expedition by some schoolchildren out to this same area, an expedition that lead to a meeting with a woman in a grey shroud, or habit. At least, that was what I could make out by the chalk stick-figures.

The sidewalk cracked and crumbled until it gave way to a dense path of trammeled dirt. We walked on in silence in the waning daylight until, finally, we came to a high hump in the ground, surrounded by thick foliage on either side.

It was a might peculiar, turtle-backed geographical feature, rising solidly up, and we knew we would have to climb it, as going around it seemed impossible. Tom Sawyer (or so I had begun to think of him) decided to go first.

He scrambled on hands and feet over the side, gripping at fistfuls of weeds, and I waited a moment before following. Suddenly, before I was over the sharp rise, just cresting the top, I heard him cry out. I blinked; I couldn’t believe my eyes.

There seemed to be some sort of thick mist or fog developing around him as he stood at the bottom of the hill. He had his arms splayed out, as if to fight back a swarm of invisible bees, but this mist seemed to gsther, and right away, as I lay at the top of that timy mound with dirt all ove rme, I realized that we were in the midst of some sort of supernatural presence. I remembered what I had heard about Graveyard Madonna, and shuddered to see my traveling companion tormented so.

“It’s got me,” he stated flatly. “I don’t think it’s going to let me go.”

He looked back up the little mound at me. His apple-cheeked face was streaked with teears of rage and humiliation. I didn’t want to go down the hill and join him. I was stuck, hung up as certainly as the image in the tarot deck.

He seemed to struggle against his misty captor, before finally crying out and falling to his knees. I waited, my heart hammering in my chest. I wanted badly to see what was going to happen next.

Nothing did.

The mist cleared away, and he crouched on his hands and knees, breathing heavily.

“It let me go,” he said. “I don’t know why. Yes, I know why. It has something it wants us to do.”

I didn’t ask what the “It” to which he was referring referred, but climbed down and joined him back along the path. We walked on a ways until we came to what seemed an abandoned lot, with a sort of large pond or almost lake next to it, and an old shack or garage, surrounded by cast-off bottles and old trash.

***

I rummaged around in the darkness, pawingf through rusted bits of junk and old piles of papers, and finding nothing that really interested me. There was a yellowed calendar on the wall, but it was too dark for me to catch the date. Tom Sawyer said, “Null, I think I know what we came here for.”

He showed me a little casket he had found. Or maybe it was a toolbox. Whatever it was, it was securely fastened, and it was the right shape of a casket.

“Here Null, pick it up. Don’t it feel special?”

“Sure. It feels kinda tingly, and like there may be something important in it. Hey, you remember those chalk drawing we saw on the sidewalk?”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

I nodded. I sure was thinking it. An idea properly presented itself to my buzzing brain. Tom Sawyer seemed to tighten all about the jaw, and his eyes took on a hazy look.

“Proper burial at sea.”

Well, it wasn’t really a sea, of course, but it was damn close enough for our purposes. Symbolic. I carried the little casket out to the water’s edge, and slipped it in. Curiously, bubbles floated to the surface, and I panicked for a moment that we had pitched in something in the box that was still breathing.

Tom did a little salute, like an old soldier. I wondered if he might not start humming Taps.

We traveled on.

***

We came to the house of seven sisters, one of whom, I was delighted to learn, was the inimitable Miss K. Miss K and I had known each other for years, and she knew me to be a thoroughly lazy, no-good SOB, but she had always had a soft spot for me, screw-up that I was, so Tom and I were allowed to spend some time in the sisters’ house.

It was a weird rectangular sort of open affair for a living room, surrounded by smaller bedrooms and bathrooms, and we got the idea that sisters liked to read a great deal, because the showpiece of the place was a battered old newsstand covered in literary detritus. Miss K spent her time poring over these old magazines, laughing at my antics, and telling me I should get back in church.

“Null, you old sinner you,” she would say, “when are you going to GROW UP and learn to take some responsibility, huh? I don’t think you can go one like this much longer. You’re looking a little rough around the edges. And you’ve gained a lot of weight.”

Indeed, all I really felt like doing, after so long a journey, was lolling in bed like the lazy, sinful creature that I was. Miss K simply tittered to herelf, smiled, went about her business, and let me rest; she rarely had a rough word for anyone, and when she did, it was usually framed in the form of a jestful comment. The other sisters made themselves scarce. There was one incident, however, that bears some repeating.

I was lying in bed one day, Miss K being wither at workl or at church (either way earning her keep and feeding me), I can’t remember which, when I woke up with two lovely young women in bed with me.

One was naked except for a pair of tight white panties. She was slim, had short dark hair, and high, tight little breasts with large nipples. She was undressing the second girl, who seemed to be either functionally impaired or mentally slow, but who could have passed for her twin. I believe this second girl to be lame, and confined to a wheelchair most of the time. I rolled over as these two sat at the edge of my bed, wondering what in hell was going on that I should be so lucky. I wanted both of their slim, hot little bodies, and I realized that Miss K had probably not let them in on the fact that I was here and I was a male.

(I know that doesn’t make much sense, but bear with me, Reader.)

I tried to imagine myself in the sisters’ company, a privy to their female secrets. Many men could turn themselves into women with the aid of a cheap wig, a little make-up, and a dress. Shaving, of course, would be a necessity. Now, with the aid of modern medical science, a fellow could become a lady with hormones and surgery, but it is a long and arduous process, and not for many. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to simly use a false vagina, a false set of breasts (made specifically of plastic or latex), and the accotrements of femaleness, rather than go all-out and get cut? In my case, yes, since all I wanted to do was to share in their little female secrets, to undress with them, and to play their games on their own terms.

It was not long after that Tom Sawyer vanished. He must have slipped out one morning, gone back on his road to find his fate and fortune, because I didn’t see him again for many years.

I examined some ofc Miss K’s reading material, which she left on her bed. It was all dirty horror comics. I wasn’t surprised. Next thing I knew, I think I ended up in hell.

***

It was some sort of musical pandemonium, and I must tell you it was a personal hell, for a limited number of recognizable faces made appearances there. Hell was apparently, for me, a rundown movie theatre, featuring a number of dull-as-paste rock n’ roll acts, each of which was more terrible and bland than the next. I wandered around through the milling crowd, wondering what had become of Miss K and her sisters. Then I remembered it had been years since I had seen them last. Miss K wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, I surmised, and went in the back, to a place that looked like a filthy kitchen with yellow tiled walls. There were people running about, sweating, preparing food, but it all looked pretty inedible. I remembered my time in prison, eating at the prison commissary, with hobos and tramps dressed in ratty suits up before me to commit sex acts and acts of violence over metal trays of pink food that looked like Italian vomit. And you didn’t dare sit at the wrong table in that cafeteria. Or maybe I am confusing that with my time in the homeless shelter. My mind is like a Moebius strip, doubling back on itself, one curved line cutting through memeories that move, like twin strands of a double-headed cobra, through the recesses of my subconscious. Which is were I live.

Suddenly I hear walls of feedback explode from the stage out front. Huge electronic explosions, white noise landscapes, synthesizer degradation, vast rumbles and laser explosions created a landscape for me that was transporting me, bodily and spiritually, into another realm. I felt myself being lifted, nearly floated back out into the concert hall.

A middle-aged man with heavy horn-rimmed glasses sat behind a huge wall of analog synths, pressing buttons and turning knobs, creating a music the lieks of which I had never heard, a music that was wild and free from constraint. It was rapturous transport of feedback and audio collage, and I felt the molecules of my body begin to shimmer and vibrate with a new understanding. Suddenly, everything speeded up.

Violence began to erupt in the audience, as people began to gibber and lose their minds, running about in the darkness and confusion, sawing off each other’s limbs, pulling each other apart piece by piece, and running through the crowd with pieces of twisted metal hook, turning over chairs, ripping out the stuffing, starting fires, stooping to shit in the aisles, and fornicating in anticipation of Judgment. In the midst of it all, a character strides up to me through the confusion, seemingly unscathed by all that is going on around us.

It is Tom Sawyer. He is older, heavier, and looks taller. But it is unmistakably him.

I notice he has a chain around his neck, extending up in some manner to the ceiling. I reckon he has found his way in life.

His wife runs up to him. She is a tall blonde girl, healthy and young, a real looker. I think she is trying to escape an eager group of gang rapists.

“It’s His chain. Yes, Null, I’ve finally found Him. And he wants you too. You can believe that.”

He seemed sad though. Like maybe he didn’t like the idea of being chained to an invisible being beyond the ken of mortal understaning. And we are not talking a metaphorical chain here; this was thick old log chain around his neck, and I was sure he had to wear it forever.

So I got out of there quick, although I’m not sure how I escaped. I remember being back at my grandmother’s, who is dead, and her house has really fallen on hard times. It looks like it should be condemned. I’m not sure who is taking care of it, but they’ve saved my mail, and it consists of a French bread roll sent out by my publishing company–but no bottle of wine. Damn. The bread is too old to eat. I stuff it back in the box and go into the bedroom, where Granpa use to sleep in walk-in closet before he died.

His closet room is still the same way he left it, little and shrunken and full of old radio parts, model airplanes,a nd what tin cans of edibles he munched in the wee hours of the morning before sleep came. No one has touched a thing; no one, that is, except for the rats.

I quickly learn there is a place for me at a special school. Now, this education thing is routine, and happens in fits and starts. This time, I am in a large, gymnasium affair that could easily be the Y downtown, expanded into some sort of Japanese institute. There are a myriad of tired cops sleeping here, and one of them has something in his room I want. I know this as instinctively as I know my name is Null, and that the world, quite frequently, doesn’t make much sense from my own particular vantage point. I ask another cop about it, and he says, “He’s gone out on assignment. Just go right on in and look around.”

“Yeah, but what if he comes back before I’m out of there? I don’t want to get busted.”

The cop blows smoke and looks off into the distance. It is night,a nd we are standing outside. It is cold. The cop is wearing a heavy trench coat and a rueful smile. His hair is whispy and unkempt, and sandy brown. His eyes show amusement.

Later, I find a pipe with a screw in it. I start to unscrew the screw, and I find that the pipe is, apparently possessed, as it begins to make a series of strange beeping sounds that are quite beautiful. I unscrew a bit more, and suddenly I am hearing voices. I know the voice.

I ask someone about it while sitting on a wall outside. I don’t get a straight answer. I want to record the voice from the talking pipe, which says something about the divisions of “five dimensions.” But I don’t have a tape recorder.

I walk down some stairs to a swimming pool.

Water to cleanse the stink. To be baptized and reborn. To another day, another life.

Null out.

Golf

There are seven tigers residing in my apartment.

I’m living with my aunt. She adopted them as little tiger cubs. It didn’t take them long to grow though, and they are now mammoth creatures that need to be fed massive amounts of meat every day, just to keep them sated,. They seem docile, tame, as if they appreciate the good situation they’ve got going here. They lol around all day, all over the furniture, their tails thumping against the coffee table. And I live in terror.

Terror because I know that, one day, the Beast Will Out, and these tigers will fall on me, and devour me. And would my aunt care? I’m not certain. She loves these animals as if they were her own children. Hell, she raised them from little cubs. She feeds them out of her hand. Besides, she sleeps all day, and can’t be bothered about her pets. So the tigers lol about with rusty purrs and twitching tails, and I’m afraid to sit next to them, or step on their claws. One fals move, after all, and I’m toast.

Dead meat. Hamburger. A bloody mess. That would be the end of Null.

Our living room is a lazy oasis for tigers. They come in one size, very large and intimidating. What’s worse, it is I who gets to feed them. Mostly from old Alpo cans. But what they want is MEAT, and we can’t really afford the good stuff. I get nervous; they are starting to look lean and hungry.

Now the management of our building hasn’t said anything about the tigers loping casually through the rooms as they come and inspect for bugs, which is regular because bugs seem to be as endemic around here as tigers. Bent down at the sink, the Bugman is looking for roaches. I’ve seen a few. They don’t, however, disturb me as much as the tigers do.

“This situation can’t go on like this forever,” I tell her. She rolls over in bed, gets up, wipes her eyes, says, “I know. But they are really quite tame, don’t you think? Nothing to be afraid of. See? He’s a gentle as a kitchen.”

I think she meant to say “kitten,” but I let it go. A great, slow, loping tiger moves, with killing grace, through the door, and jumps up into bed next to her. She runs her fingers through the thick fur, and the thing emit’s a treacherous, rusty growl. I shrink back. These tigers will be the death of me.

When I called the policeman, he came in and took stock of the situation immediately. “Look lady,” he tells my aunt, “We have laws in this state, see? You can’t just go keeping seven tigers in your house. Not in an apartment this size. It isn’t kosher.”

She sits up in bed, eyes the policeman warily, and asks him what she’s supposed to do. Where, after all, will they go, if she has to get rid of them?

“That’s not my problem, lady. I’m giving you one month. If, when I come back, these tigers are still here, you’re going to be in trouble. A lot of trouble. Understand?”

She nodded. I went outdoors, not feeling very well for having called the law on my aunt. Outside, there was a regular convention of apartment complex tenants going on. Someone was restraining a huge black cat with an arched back, that I at first took to be a dog. Maybe a vicious pit bull. But it was obviously a cat. What were they all doing out here, these milling throngs of people?

Suddenly a man steps forward with a gold club. He has on a funny checkered cap, and a sort of flight jacket that is a really garish purple. He starts chipping at these golfballs. I make this is some kind of impromptu tournament.

He hit’s the ball across the parking lot. Suddenly, a younger man (I believe this to be his son) steps forward, dressed in exactly the same manner. He is smaller, plumper, but could pass for an exact duplicate of the first golfer. He takes his turn chipping the balls. One flies across the parking lot.

Then a third man suddenly appears from nowhere. He is dressed exactly as the first two, and looks as if he might be the brother of the older man. An uncle perhaps. A dirty uncle.

He chips a golf ball. Someone yawns. I hear clapping in the crowd. I walk out across the hot parking lot. Somewhere, a dog is taking a shit on someone’s lawn. And this is another day.

Miss K

So mother and I loaded up in the car, and I had the directions written down right off the Net, and we made it out to the place, which was huge and ugly and decrepit and looked like it was big enough for twenty families. I was excited. I hadn’t seen Miss K in many years.

She greeted me at the door, but she seemed oddly distant, even in her effusive greeting. I immediately saw what lines the years had put in her face, how they had toughened the once sweet but now aged features until they stood out starkly against eyes that still held a little of the old glitter. Eyes that were fading, though.

“Oh, come in dear. Oh, my dear, it has been so long since I saw you last, and we have so much catching up to do. People change, you know.”

I followed her long straight back through the dimly-lit corridor, and heard her voice come awinding down the walls of time, like a hollow echo of former days. Her hair was done up in a little bun.

Inside, I could see how old the place was, even with the thin veneer of modernity put upon it; the walls and ceiling were cracked, the wallpaper was peeling and yellow, and the furniture was quite old. Also, the place seemed to collect darkness in pools and eddies of pitch that were quite unsettling. I went into the kitchen first, followed her into the dining room, and then we went into a sort of parlor.

In there, various children and what I supposed were members of her family wer sitting, talking excitedly amongst themselves. One was a teenage girl with long, straight black hair, and she seemed to be playing games with the smaller children. I wondered which children belonged to Miss K, and which were merely playmates visiting.

Miss K made me a cup of tea, and talked frantically, telling me about her job and her husband, and all the exciting things she had done in her nine years apart from me.

“I’m an adjunct professor you know. I have a lot of unmotivated students to deal with. But, I’ve had a lot of practice, raising a family the way I have.”

“You seem to be getting on pretty well for yourself,” I said lamely. I sat down at the kitchen table with my cup of tea, nursing the hot stuff in the palm of my hand.

“We get along okay. E is a supervisor now, so he gets a lot of extra hours. It’s tough sometimes in this economy, to feed a family. But, luckily, we always seem to make ends meet. The good Lord will provide, as the book says.”

“You always believed that,” I said, again lamely.

“I still do. So, how have you been getting along?”

Ah, there was the magic question: How have YOU been getting along all these years, Null? I didn’t know what to say. What could I possibly tell her? That I was old and broken down and living on psychiatric disability? That I was, fundamentally, no better off than I had ever been before? I felt a strong sense of embarrassment, and I told her some tosh that I knew she didn’t believe.

“I make some money…from my writing.” I lied. I had never made any real money from my writing, and most probably never will. It’s my sorry fate to be a starving artist.

“Oh. Well. You always were a great writer. Written anything I might have read? Under an assumed name, maybe?” She started to laugh. She had a very high, hollow voice, a sweet voice, musical tones. And pretty hands; they looked as if they might have been carved from Ivory soap.

I didn’t know what to say, so quickly turned the topic of conversation to other things. In the next room, the kids seemed to have quieted down. I suppose the teenage girl was the babysitter (it takes me awhile, sometimes, to figure out what should be most obvious).

She leaned over and kissed me. I felt a hot flush. My mother was sitting in the next room, talking to the children. And this was a married woman.

“E wouldn’t have liked me doing that. He get’s insanely jealous if another guy so much as looks at me. But…that’s for allt he years spent apart. I’ve missed you,” she sighed, and took my hand. He rhand was very cool and delicate, but my face suddenly felt hot. I saw the image of her husband, and suddenly felt like I was making him into a sort of cuckold. Also, I knew he had a slumbering violence inside of him, and I thought he might beat or kill me if he came home just then.

Did he ever beat her, I wondered. I looked deeply into her face; the lines were cutting quite deep now into her graying features; she was no longer the young girl I had known nine years previously. Now she was a middle-aged woman, old and tired and spent with children and duties of home.

“E will just have to understand about today. C’mon. I’m going to take you out to dinner. It’s on me. Red Lobster. Doesn’t that sound delicious?”

I agreed that it did.

I went and told my mother that Miss K would be bringing me hime after dinner, and so Mother disappeared. Just vanished. Must have blown out the door before I could catch a glimpse of her leaving. I’m not sure what happened to all the kids, either, except the babysitter must have taken them to some other room in the giant old apartment house, because I saw them no more.

“This place is exactly like your old place. It’s supposed to be haunted. I think it really is, too.”

“It does look very old.”

“It is. I bet it was built sometime around 1888. Maybe when Jack the Ripper was stalking London. What do you think?”

“I think you still seem a lot like the girl I use to know.”

At that we fell into uncomfortable silence.

***

Gong down the stairs was the difficult part. They were very steep,a nd seemed slippery, and we had to hold onto the high stone balustrades to keep from sliding down them, which would have been nasty.

“Oh, these damn stairs scare the hell out of me. It’s the one thing I hate about living here. I go through this every damn day.”

At one point I actually expected her to get down on her hands and knees and start crawling down. But we did make it down, and to the car, although I don’t rememeber much about the drive.

We went inside. I was aghast. I had never been in a restaurant like this before. One thing was for certain: it was NOT a Red Lobster.

“How can you afford a place like this?” I asked, looking up at the cavernous ceiling and the rows of polished glass doors that seemed to lead to mysterious, secret rooms. She looked back at me and said off-handedly, “Oh, it’s okay. E and I come here all the time. We find it very romantic.”

“WE,” I reminded her, “are not supposed to feel romantic, Miss K. Just old friends visiting each other and having dinner, after too many years apart.”

“I know,” she giggled, and for a moment, beneath the seamed and aged face of the older woman, I could see the gentle, wily skull of the young girl exposed in heathen wonder, the skull that promised sensual pleasure, and promoted itself as something fine and fancy for the world to behold.

(In reality, she was a simple peasant girl from hillbilly stock. Same social background as myself.)

She put her hand gently to my chest, stopped me from going forward, said, “Wait.”

She disappeared. It was almost as if I was catastrophically drunk, and time was skipping into little cut-ups. One moment she was there, the next moment she had disappeared into one of the welling pools of darkness that painted the heavy wooden floor.

When she reappeared, she had on a long silver dress, and I thought I must be dreaming.

“Well, do you like it? How do you like me now?”

How do you like me…like me now?

It was almost as if I could hear those words echo in my skull. I felt cold and clammy and sodden, ashamed of my broken physical body, my tawdry leather jacket, my old ball cap. I was a pauper dating a princess, one that happened to be “happily married” for years.

How do you like me? Now?

It was a dangerous question.

I put my hand in my pocket. An old cassette tape fell out. It was Gerogerigegege, a Japanese noise act. It clattered to the floor, and she bent over in curiosity and picked it up.

“What’s this? I can’t even pronounce it.”

“It’s…Japanese experimental music. Experimental music is a big interest of mine these days.”

“Oh, she said,” not really understanding what I was talking about. We must have ordered food, because the next thing I remember (Gentle Reader, my memory is not good, so just bear with me) is that we were sitting in a sort of waiting room that looked like a high school shop class, but must have been one of those fancy art-deco dining rooms because there was a flat screen hanging from the wall.

“Hey, they have the internet on this thing!” I took the remote and was busly trying to dial up You Tube. I wanted to play a Boyd Rice video, although now I can’t remember exactly which one. I think it was “Watery Leviathan,” but it might more appropriately have been the rare track “People Change.” I looked back at where she was seated on a stool at a wooden table, with her legs kicked up. To my horror, she was smoking a cigarette.

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” I asked, putting down the remote and walking up to her.

She said, innocently enough, “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m smoking.”

I was flabbergasted. She had never smoked before.

I, myself, had smoked for years, but had recently switched over to the e-cig, vapor cigarette, as a safer alternative.

“Well, I figured since we were going to be together all day, I might as well smoke, since I assumed you still did. But I guess you smoke the e-cig now, huh?”

“Sure.”
***
She went to get our food, or check on our order, and I was starting to get worried, as she had been gone a long time. I decided to go out into the labyrinthine hallways and look for her. But which doors to try?

I saw some forms moving behind pebbled glass double doors, and could hear the steady thump of pounding music.

I cautiously opened the door. Inside, there was a band on a low stage, belting out Eighties pop tunes. They could have been Huey Lewis and the News, for all I knew, because you could barely see them through all the colored lights and smoke of the smog machine. People danced like zombies, and I backed away slowly, bumping into a massively tall woman in a long silver dress. He hair was done up in a massive coif. I suddenly realized it was a student teacher I had known in high school, twenty years before.

She looked down at me with glazed eyes. I wondered if she recognized me. Curiously, she didn’t seem to be a day older than the last time I had seen her.

She said something unintelligible. I think she was drunk. She was snapping her fingers, and swaying stiffly to the music. I got the hell out of there.

I hope the meal was enjoyable, because I don’t remember a thing about it. Later, we drove back to her apartment building, and she must have invited me back in for coffee or something, because we had to face those same stone steps again.

I look down, and I can see the narrow space between the wall of the building, which is brick, and the steps themselves; narrow, but not so narrow that someone couldn’t fall into that space and become trapped, crushed.

The steps were a nightmare to climb up. My feet kept slipping, but I wasn’t as afraid of falling as she was apparently, because now I can see she has literally gotten down on her hands and knees, and is crawling up those rough stone steps. I did a double take; I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.

She might as well have been wearing lengths of chain, she was straining so hard. Oh, Miss K, why did you leave me this way, in the lurch, wondering after you, as you putter away an existence in the comfortable cog life has prepared for you? Are you suffering Miss K? Can you make it up and down that staircase and into the arms of that Other Man, the one who stole your heart and the glamour in your eyes?

Why should I care? You’re as alien to me as you ever were. I’m defeated, and spent, and alone. In the end, I am Null.

In the Field

It was the summer when he visited the grandparents because the parents were fighting, and wanted freedom, and it was as good excuse as any to get rid of him, he reckoned. He wasn’t worried that they would get a divorce, not yet anyway. That long summer, all he worried about mostly were old comic books, television science fiction shows, and soda pop.

Grandpa and Grandma’s house always had a weird, apple-like, cinnamon smell that masked an odor that many suspected wafted up from the poor pipes. Lousy sewer. Everyone lives over a river of shit, whether they realize it or not. What was it William S. Burroughs once wrote about not wanting to be president, but be “Commissioner of Sanitation” or some such nonsense?

Grandpa and Grandma were distant figures. Grandpa slept all day, and Grandma emerged to bake cookies with her hair in curlers and her hose rolled down below her knees. At night, they sat in the living room, and Grandpa read the paper and Grandma looked at the television, but only softly. Or, sometimes, they played old records.

The house was always spotless, although he never saw Grandma do any cleaning. Which, later, he thought of as peculiar.

The house was on the edge of a road where the houses straggled off into the country. An old cornfield grew across from their property, in back of the neighbors’ place, and it was here that he was invariably drawn that long summer, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. It seemed like there was mystery hidden in those endless stalks of old corn, like every time he penetrated the brown, crisp stalks he was walking into the heart of some secret labyrinth. And he could sit behind the rows and lose himself.

But he knew he wasn’t supposed to be in the neighbors’ yard. He hadn’t been specifically told about it, but he got the impression the Stolzes were an odd couple. They were as old (if not older) than his grandparents, and both of them spoke with an accent that sounded faintly German, but was inscrutable nonetheless. He figured them to be a fruitcake and a nutbar, and Mrs. Stolz was always out in back, pulling weeds, whistling, and talking to herself. Her husband was rarely seen.

He couldn’t remember exactly when it was he had first heard the whispering, but it hadn’t really scared him. Not at first. At first, it merely puzzled him. He looked about for a source, but could find none.

He cautiously stammered out, “Who’s there?” There was no one there.

He continued to explore the old corn field.

***

He saw the shadow only a few days after that. It seemed to be cast from the adjacent row, as if someone was standing back there, hiding. He gasped, got up, dust clinging to his bottom, and wondered what on Earth to do. He was quick to let curiosity overcome him.

He pushed back the stalks, said, “Hello? Anybody there?” he then hopefully added, “Can we be friends?”

He heard a faint rustling, a faint whispering. Then the sun went behind a cloud, and all was silent.

Steve McCloud was a secret agent on a dangerous mission.

“Why do you watch such crap. Irene, why do you let the kid watch such crap on the television.”

“He likes it. And this show is for families anyway.”

Steve was hanging at the lounge, all by himself, waiting for his connection. The Chinese man lurked in the shadows with a weapon hidden under his trench coat.

Steve turned around, smiled his toothsome shark smile, and greeted him in High Mandarin.

A hand disappeared under a coat. A blow gun. The Chinese man brought the little tube to his lips, puffed.

Steve put a hand to his neck. He looked as if he was getting woozy. There were spirals and circles erupting behind his eyelids, and he fell over into a whirlpool of shadows, a place where voices echoed out like dragging rubber. The next moments disappeared into a thick fog.

A smiling woman held up a bottle of detergent. Behind her, her husband bent over to inspect the kitchen sink. Then, a hyperactive man in a suit with question marks told all about “free government money.” He yawned.

Steve woke up in a strange bed. Above him, the beautiful Cruenta said, “Well, well Mr. McCloud, it looks as if the effects of the drug have finally worn off.”

Steve rubbed his head and sat up.

“Where am I? Is this where–”

“Yes. No. I can’t tell you. All I can say, for right now, is that the situation is under control. So, McCloud, we meet again after so many years. And under such unusual and difficult circumstances.”

Steve hopped out of bed. He wasn’t wearing pajamas. He was dressed in an old T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. Cruenta looked at him passionately, then fell into his arms.

“Oh Steve, Steve, why must we be enemies, just because our two countries are at war? Oh, if you only knew how many nights I have dreamed of you holding me like this.”

Cruenta had an accent that was faintly Russian.

Steve said, “I know baby. It’s tough. The world wasn’t made for lovers. But we’ve got to be tough. Got to be one step ahead of the game.”

“Kiss me, you mad fool!”

They kissed. A football player sold chicken pot pies. He nodded over on his arm.

When he came back from a place where he was being told not to pee on the floor, Steve had cold-cocked some big, hulking guy, stolen his gun, and was standing in the foyer of some mansion, holding the gun on some little bald man with a cane. He had to pee.

“Okay Yuschenko, I want some answers, and I want ‘em now!”

The little bald man tittered, smiled an evil smile revealing gold teeth, and said, “Yes, Mr. McCloud, you DO want answers. Many things around here need answering. Well, I promise you, you shall have your answers! You shall have them.”

The next image was of an empty doorway. The little bald man turned his face to the doorway and called out something in some weird, guttural language.

Suddenly, he felt his eyes pop open WIDE.

A thing shambled through the doorway.

It was huge and green. It was shaped a little like a turnip with legs. It had one big eye in the center of its forehead, and a beak with rows of needle-sharp teeth beneath. What’s more, it had a row of tentacles sticking out from its big, green, pulpy head. It spoke the same guttural language, although it sounded like it was gurgling water while it was doing it.

The gun went off twice. It didn’t slow the thing down as it came through the door. He felt his eyes grow wide.

Steve screamed.

It ate his head.

Suck plop!

Like it was a big, gory mess of candy.

***

But that couldn’t be right because the next scene Steve was running across what looked like a tennis resort with a friendly agent. They were being chased on foot. He turned off the set.

“Time for dinner, Billy. You’ll love it, I promise. Chicken pot pie, fresh out of the oven.”

“Best dinner for a growing boy,” said Grandpa.

They sat down to eat, and he did have to admit that Grandma’s chicken pot pie was delicious stuff. It certainly hit the spot, and kept on swinging. He had almost two huge helpings, and finished it off with ice cream. Grandma said, “Grandpa, I think we have a little pig on our hands here. “Oink, oink, oink…” Grandma began to make snootey sounds.

“Rosemary stop it,” said Grandpa, tilting back a little and peering closely at the paper. Grandma got up and collected the dishes.

“Billy, why don’t you go out and play before it gets too dark. You could use a little exercise after all that food.”

Billy wanted to do just that. He pushed himself back from the table, went to wash his hands, and then headed out the back, into the yard.

The shadows were growing longer as he walked to the chain-link fence. He could smell sweet hibiscus, and the scent of peppers and fried food wafting down the street. In the distance, houses gave way to old fields, and, above, the sky was an orange temple of sunset. Things were picture perfect.

He went out of the gate, and walked across the edge of the Stolz’s property and into the thick of the field. He could hear it suddenly, the whispering on the wind.

He stepped into the field. He began to walk slowly forward, saying his name, singing, asking if anyone was there, trying to fight down the weird, creeping sense of otherness that was pervading his being. He felt his body tremble in the wind.

He walked slowly, his feet creeping across the grit. There–he fancied he could hear it say his name!

Billy! Billy! Come to me!

Had it really said those words? He wasn’t sure. It was such a whispering, murmuring sound, his ears could be deceiving him; it could have said anything. He walked ahead a few paces, feeling the old dry stalks husk against his shoulders. And there it was!

The shadow. Someone was hiding in the corn! He suddenly rushed forward, dove into the next row, put his hands out…and touched nothing.

He looked around, confused. Then, the sky overhead seemed to darken.

He looked up.

He saw the smile of a shark. Twin eyes of deep cobalt blue stared into his own from a raggedy head, whisped in white. The man was wearing what appeared to be old, ragged clothing. His jaw was prominent, his forehead large and round, and he was going bald.

He was the skinniest, weirdest guy that he had ever seen.

“Hello there. I’ve seen you playing around here. Why don’t you come with me, and we can play together?”

The man put his large-knuckled hands on his hips. His grin seemed to be fixed to his face as if painted there by a cruel joke of a god. The wind blew his old, frayed jacket about his tall, gangling frame.

“I don’t think so, mister,” he said. “I’m not supposed to go with strangers.” He backed up; he could feel his heels twist clumsily in the dirt.

The man laughed. “Oh, I’m no stranger Billy. We’ve known each other, oh, a long time. But you were very young then, and you don’t remember.”

He backed up a little, looked around. They seemed so alone out here, and it was as if time had stopped. There was no sound coming from any of the nearby animals. Not so much as a dog barking. The man cast a long shadow across Billy’s form.

“Say, do you live out here or something?”

The man said, “Or…something. The Stolzes know about me. As a matter of fact, they’re the ones who invited me in. It’s not my custom to go where I’m not wanted. But c’mon Billy, we have to get going if we’re going to go and play; the hour is growing late, and the barrier can only be crossed when it’s thinnest…now is the time.”

And the man turned, and strode off into the brown husks. And, despite his fear, Billy followed.

***

He felt Mr. Stolz grab his shoulder, jerking him awake.

“You little snoop! What are you doing out here?”

Billy felt his head clear slowly. Then his vision came back from blurry, sharpening to a crystal clarity that almost made it seem as if he had been looking out through a thick fog.

“You’re the Johnson boy, aren’t you? From next door? Well, I’ll teach you to snoop around on other people’s property! We’ll just see what your grandpa and grandma have to say about this.”

And with that Billy felt himself jerked out of the field and across the yard toward the backdoor of his grandparents’ house. He suddenly noticed something odd: he was soaked from head to toe.

***

After much fretting and fuming, Billy was put to bed. Upstairs, he felt a case of the sniffles coming on, probably from being wet out in the cold. It didn’t bother him. His mind was a million light years away.

He remembered the man with the electric blue eyes. The man in the corn.

He closed his eyes. He could still see the man clearly. Tall, skinny, skull a little too big, eyes a little too bright. Billy rolled over on his side.

***

The man seemed to have grown weight. Billy approached him in the corn, while the man seemed to be fighting some kind of agitated battle with his own body. He was grabbing at his coat, which seemed to be moving and bulging in strange ways. Billy crept forward.

The man turned. He opened his coat and groaned, as if freeing himself from a great weight. Billy screamed.

Hundreds of large rats fell out from under his coat. The dropped in piles around his feet, squealing and scurrying in all directions.

The man’s eyes flamed into red. His face now seemed the very face of a skull. His teeth were little rat-like fangs.

Billy! C’mon. It’s playtime. Matter of fact, it’s heaven in here, and we have all of eternity.”

Billy could hear something crash through the stalks, saw a brown, humped shape obscured by husks of corn. He suddenly knew that this was a rat, the biggest rat in the world, and the hungriest. He turned, but his feet seemed glued to the spot.

***

The scream brought Grandma upstairs, but he was more concerned with what was going on below, outside his window, then reassuring her.

She tucked him in, and he was compliant. He pretended as if he intended to go back to sleep. As soon as she had shut the door, he bolted up in bed and went to the window. Outside, in the darkness, he could see a flashlight bobbing up and down in the corn. Old Man Stolz was out there for some reason, looking for something. Billy could feel his pulse race. If he had known what the word “portentous” meant, he would have used it to describe tonight.

He found himself walking out the back door. The moon was a sickle-shaped sword in the sky, and there seemed to be no stars. He could hear the cicadas chirp, hear the rustle of the trees as the gentle breeze of evening played through their branches. Ahead, as he made his way into the corn, he could see that flashlight still bobbing up and down. What was the old man looking for?

He could hear the old man muttering to himself, cursing; he could hear foul words float over to him on the gentle breeze. He didn’t understand some of these words, but he knew they were bad. They made him feel slightly icky, like when he caught Mommy and Daddy using them against each other. He crouched low behind some corn stalks, watching the flashing light bob up and down in the rows.

Suddenly, he heard the Stolzes’ back door swing open and shut. Mrs. Stolz stood out on the back porch with her arms folded across her chest. In the corner of her mouth smoldered a cigarette. He could smell the smoke come wafting over to him on the breeze.

At first she spoke to him in her faintly German accent, words Billy could just barely make out. Then she totally surprised him.

She spoke in the weird, gurgling language he had heard on the television show. Or in his dreams. He wasn’t sure which. She came off the porch steps and stood in the yard, her arms still folded, looking out over the corn field as the flashlight bobbed up and down, and her husband made his way through the stalks. Billy could feel his heart pump icily. If he was discovered here…

Suddenly, the wind seemed to pick up a little bit. It blew dust and old leaves into a little whitling eddy, as Billy could suddenly feel electricity in the air. His skin began to prickle.

Mrs. Stolz stamped her cigarette out in the dirt, swayed a little on her feet, and then put her arms up, as if pushing back against an invisible force. Her eyes seemed to close to slits, and she began to murmur something in the strange language. Suddenly, Billy saw what he at first took to be fireflies dancing around Mrs. Stolz’s arms.

But they weren’t fireflies. They were little blue sparks. Billy felt his skin began to prickle and crackle, and his hair seemed to be standing on end. The wind picked up to a gale, the stalks started blowing out of the dry ground, wrenched up into the air, and Billy suddenly felt as if he was in the heart of a miniature twister.

Mr. Stolz walked over into the row where Billy was hiding. Suddenly, Billy felt the flashlight beam illuminate his shadowy form. “You!” he cried. “What are you doing here? Oh, you’ve got to get out of here, boy, you don’t know what kind of danger you’re in! Why, turn the wrong corner here and…”

He suddenly came forward, put his hand on Billy’s shoulder, and jerked him toward him. Behind them, in the yard, Mrs. Stolz had worked herself up into an extacy of gibberish chanting, her arms still raised, her face a red, swelling, sweating mess. Her eyes were watery squints, spilling tears, and she looked as if she were on the verge of some kind of mad ecstasy.

The wind was now a howling tempest. Bright flashes of blue spark began to shoot through the sky around them, and Billy struggled to get free of the old man’s grasp.

“let me go, you old bastard!” Billy was surprised to hear himself curse, but the intensity of the moment seemed to demand it. The old man cursed himself, then let the boy go. He turned, the beam of his flashlight suddenly falling on a large, humped shape that had appeared moving through the dry husks.

The old man turned, yelled out: “Run, boy! Run!”

They did, the old man trailing Billy as the great, humped shape crashed through the corn stalks, knocking them over. It was a shambling thing in the darkness, but Billy felt he knew what it might be…if he could see it clearly. But, even daring to glance over his shoulder, he realized there was no seeing it clearly; it seemed to be a shifting of shadow and moonlight which hovered, just barely, on the edge of taking shape.

It was a few moments before they were out of the corn. Mr. Stolz walked up to his wife and took her hand. Billy hunkered down at the far side of the yard, too scared to get much closer, and watched as the great hulking shape came out of the corn. It was unmistakably a rat, the biggest rat he had ever seen. It looked to be roughly the size of a young calf.

It suddenly stood up on its hind legs, its arms grasping at nothing, and before his astounded eyes, Billy saw the rat transform. It seemed to melt into itself, becoming smaller and smaller until it wore the final form of a man. It was the raggedy stranger he had met the previous day.

But the face was different, seeming somehow unformed, or unshaped. It flowed like wet clay across the skull, and from the mouth came a sad mewling. But the eyes were still twin coals of red, and seemed to glow from within.

It tottered forward drunkenly, held out a hand as if to say “Pleased to make your acquaintance”, and then turned, heading back toward the corn. Suddenly, from its shoulders, a shower of crisp, brittle leaves began to blow in the wind, covering the yard in the howling gale. Billy rubbed his eyes; the man seemed to be disappearing in a shower of twisting leaves.

The Stolzes were still holding hands, and seemed to be praying. Suddenly, Billy could hear his grandma calling from the back porch. Calling him inside, were all was safe and warm. He suddenly knew he had to run.

There was something chasing him.

He couldn’t quite see it, but he knew it was behind him. He took off across the yard, bolted up the steps, into the back, past Grandma, and up the stairs.

He ran inside, slammed the door, dove into bed, and twisted his face up under the covers. He could hear movement downstairs, and then the heavy trea of feet on the stairs. Then, it seemed as if he could hear a screeching howl the likes of which he had never heard before in his life. It sounded like the howl of an angry animal.

There was a monstrous thump against the door, and he could hear the creaking and splintering of the wood as something hammered itself against the jamb. He thought he knew what it might be. The question was: Could anything stop it?

He reached up and switched the channel. The reception was poor. He rolled over in bed. The TV was blaring. Grandpa was watching the morning news.

He didn’t have a TV in his room. So this was only a dream then. So the rat-thing wasn’t real either, even as it stalked around the room, smoke blowing from its snout–it wasn’t real. It tripped over furniture, and had torn a seat to fluffy, cottony shreds, but it wasn’t real.

Grandma was coming up the stairs. Below, he could hear the sounds of someone downstairs. Sounded like they were munching breakfast. Probably the Stolzes.

(They were, after all, his parents, weren’t they?)

The rat-thing eyed him with beady black orbs. Thin streamers of saliva dripped down from its razor-sharp teeth. Billy remembered Steve McCloud’s head disappearing down the gullet of an awful alien thing with tentacles and one eye. He was glad such things couldn’t exist in real life. He put out his hand.

He stroked the fur.

He wondered.

In time, he screamed until the rafters shook with the delightful fury of his frenzied pleas.

It Glows in the Dark!

I know you’ve heard every damn UFO story there is to tell, but maybe this is one you actually haven‘t heard. It’s not told often, so here goes:

Bub was plugging his wife from hell to breakfast, having just returned home from a hunting trip in the Alleghenies one summer evening in October of 1896. He came home rangier than a polecat dipped in prairie shit, and when he greased up his power tool with a fistful of lard (after dropping his bib overalls and long johns and telling the missy to “get her tail feathers over here!”), he plunged as deep as his withered old balls would allow, straight up to the hilt and back again.

The little woman, who had lifted her dusty old skirt with a wink and a shudder, moaned and began to bounce back and forth on his pikestaff, just as happy as a clam. The two of them were getting worked up to a good lather when, suddenly, out of the clear blue, they could hear a weird, warbling, whining whistle come “like knobby tires on a wet pavement,” streaking out from overhead. They moaned and groaned and huffed and puffed, but they stopped because, out of the window, they could see something streak out of the sky.

“Tar nation!” cried Bub. “I think it’s one of them thar meteors, Ma!”

“Well, I’ll declare,” cried Bub’s wife, “it sure as shit picked a good time to come along and interrupt us!”

They heard a tremendous crash through the trees, and saw a bright orange glow that they greatly feared was fire. Bub got his overalls back up and buttoned, and the missus went to fetch a pail of water. They both headed out the front door onto the porch, across the yard and into the nearby woods.

There were tree branches broken and flattened, burned grass, and Bub could plainly see that something heavy had come down close by. Then he smelled the smoke, and following his nose, lead the wife straight down an old path through the trees, finally coming upon the smoking crater that had been punched into the ground from above.

Bub cautiously scooted to the side of the crater, his eyes watering from the smoke and stink. Below, he could see a great round stone, glowing orange from heat and intense light, and he could hear a weird hissing.

“Oh my gracious sakes alive, Ma! It sure as shit’s a meteor alright. And landed right smack dab on our property, too. Say, wonder what they’d pay for it up at the college?”

Ma was less than thrilled with the find.

“Lord don’t it ever stink! Like tar and sulfur and hogshit all rolled up into one.”

Suddenly, they both could hear a weird sort of banging and clanging, like metal being moved around and scraped along a floor. Then, to their amazement, a door blew open in the side of the thing! They ran back from the edge of the crater, their hands over their mouths (and Ma’s other hand over her eyes), and, below them, a weird figure covered in hair seemed to emerge from the doorway in the meteor.

He looked like a gorilla with red eyes. He was a little fellow with long arms and fingers, staggering a bit. Otherwise, he was the very spitting image of a hairy ape man.

Bub wished badly that he had brought his gun with him, but hadn’t thought he would need it. (After all, why would you need to shoot a meteor?) Instead of running, though, the two of them stood stock-still in amazement as the strange creature (Bub just KNEW it was a bonafide Martian) climbed up out of the pit with its hairy claws, stood swaying on its feet as if it had just drunk a gallon of sour mash, uttered a strange word, grabbed its throat, and keeled over dead. Bub and his wife just stood there in amazement.

“It’s a Martian, Ma! I’ll be hogtied and dipped in gopher shit if that ain’t a bonafide, honest-to-goodness, dad-blamed man from Mars!”

Ma sighed. She wiped her hands on her aprons, and crept toward the body, which already seemed to be turning a weird, ashy grey.

“Yeah, but what good is he now? He’s dead.”

Bub was too excited to be put down.

“Still good, Ma! Still good! Why, a fella would pay a pretty penny to get his first glimpse of a Martian, dead or alive. C’mon, help me get him to the house. We’ll pickle him in an old barrel and sell him to the highest bidder!”

He wasn’t hard to carry between them. As a matter of fact, he was damn light. They took him back to the cabin, laid him out on an old bunk, and Bub went to fetch a barrel and some moonshine (to preserve the body), while Ma went to fetch dinner. (Carrying dead Martians around, she observed, made a body hungry.)

Ma wasn’t the only one thinking of dinner, however. That old dog Samson hadn’t been fed yet that day, and he was mighty hungry. He went rustling around in the yard for scraps, but found he was coming up bare. In time, he was joined by another neighborhood cur, and then another. The three dogs commiserated for a moment, then one of them sniffed the air and said, “Say fellas, I think I smell something over at the Johnson place, smells like chicken.”

The others sniffed.

“Yankee Pot Roast,” said Samson.

“Rabbit stew,” said the third cur.

The three of them crept to the door of the Johnson cabin. Ma was at the cook stove slaving away, not paying a bit of attention. The three dogs skittered across the floor to the old bunk, where the Martian was laid out in quiet repose.

They sniffed at him. They decided that, indeed, he did smell like chicken.

They suddenly fell upon the corpse, devouring it like it was a rare, wonderful piece of meat. Ma turned from the cook stove, put her hands to her head, and cried out, just as Bub came through the door, hefting an old barrel of moonshine. He dropped it, went for his gun, cried, “God damned dogs! I’ll teach you to ruin a perfectly good Martian!”

The mangy curs skittered across the floor haphazardly, before taking to the yard. One of them was grazed by a round of buckshot, but escaped otherwise unscathed.

Inside, all was havoc, as Bub looked at the bed and raged. The foulest language you ever heard escaped his lips, and he bemoaned his sorry fate; that he was born, apparently, to always have bad luck in the end.

“All ruined! All ruined! All that good money down the drain! Nobody ain’t gonna pay a penny for that mess of slops!”

Indeed, the Martian was now a gory, mangled mess of entrails, all spread across the old bunk in a haphazard fashion. It looked like somebody had dynamited a raspberry pie filled with pig innards.

Ma, more thoughtful than Bub, stood there a moment as if in shock, and then said, “Well, what about the damn meteorite itself? That landed on OUR property. Might someone not pay a pretty penny or two to have a look at that?”

Suddenly Bub brightened up.

“Sure Ma! Why, that’s good thinking! We’ll go on down there and have another look at that meteor. Probably cooled off a great deal by now. Maybe take a couple of oxen to pull it back here! Whew! That’s just the ticket!”

Then suddenly Bub grew serious, and his voice lowered, as he said, “Say, Ma, you don’t reckon there’s any more of them Martian fellows hiding in that there meteor, do ya? Perhaps I better take my gun.”

“Perhaps you better.”

And with that they both left.
***

They walked back through the crushed grass and the broken branches, to the still-smoking crater, and peered down at the large, rock-like object in the center. It seemed big enough for two, maybe three people to sit in comfortably.

Cautiously, Bub climbed down the side of the crater, carefully holding his rifle out in front of him, while Ma followed at a respectful distance.

They came to the door in the meteor. Bub looked inside. The sun was setting, but, inside, he fancied he could see what looked to be shiny knobs and controls in the murky darkness. He stepped through the doorway cautiously; Ma followed.

Suddenly the door slammed shut.

“My word, it sure is dark in here,” said Bub.

The object lifted off, shot into the sky, and headed for worlds unknown.
***

Sheriff Smutz clomped around the floor of the old cabin, his face contorted into a pickled grimace. Boy, didn’t the gory offal on that bunk stink to high heaven! His deputy, Andy, came in from the yard.

The Sheriff put his pipe in his mouth, turned, lit a match, lit the pipe, and said, “Need something to cover the stink. Any sign of the Johnsons?”

Andy shook his head.

“No Sheriff. Looks like they clean disappeared. But, Sheriff, looks like something weird done crashed out in the woods, out yonder, something heavy. Big. Tree branches are broken, and grass is crushed and burnt up and whatnot.”

Sheriff Smutz considered. He waved his hand at the gory mess drying on the old bunk. “Any idea what this stinking stuff is?”

Deputy Andy shook his head, said, “Not a clue, Sherriff. But it smells just about like those three dogs I found out at the edge of the yard. Man, I’ve seen some mangy, sick-looking mutts in my time, but these three have to take the cake.”

The Sheriff raised his eyebrows.

“Dogs?”

“Sure. Three of ‘em. All look about half-starved. They’re all sick as hell, throwing up and shitting all over the place. And their shit smells like what’s on that bed. And I’ll tell you another thing, Sheriff.”

“What’s that?”

Andy drew close, and his voice fell to a near-whisper, although Sheriff Smutz couldn’t figure out exactly why.

“Something mighty strange is a-going on around here, boss, and it ain’t just that weird thing what’s crashed out in the woods. Now, I seen dog shit, and I seen dog shit, but, for the life of me, I ain’t NEVER seen no dog shit quite like this before.”

“Really? How so?”

“Well, boss, I know you been around the block a time or two, but I don’t think even you could tell me you’ve ever seen dog shit that glows in the goddamn dark!”

Goat Head Albino

The doctor comes out, stands at the podium, shuffles some papers, and readjusts the heavy glasses perched at the end of his withered blue nose.

“Gentleman and ladies…that is, hostages to fortune, ahem, we have all gathered you here today for the express purpose of testing out certain highly dangerous mind-altering substances that the CIA has assured us are completely safe, if not entirely ethical or legal. The substances themselves, ahem, are not what strictly interest us…No, the purposes of this study are far more esoteric than just testing out a wild new hallucinogen on a bunch of unwitting volunteers…ahem. Now, where was I?”

He bends over, shuffles more papers. Bill looks over at the chisel-faced boy sitting a few rows away from him. The boy looks as if he is bathed in a halo of blood. A few minutes before, he had been standing outside with Becka, wearing a Tuxedo.

Bill thought this was strange behavior, and it nearly put him in a foul mood. Who the hell wore a tux on a day like today, when the temperature was somewhere in the vicinity of the mid-nineties? Bill himself is bathed in a halo of sweat, but that dim red glow still seems to emanate from the chisel-faced boy, and Bill begins to wonder if it isn’t just a trick of his mind.

He was use to such tricks. He had suffered a nervous breakdown two years ago, had almost not pulled out of the tailspin he had gone down in, but was now doing markedly better. He had even managed to start classes, like everyone else, at the university. Still, there were periods when he was not entirely certain that he wasn’t simply dreaming his life, back in bed, rolled up in a little ball and looking at a distant point in the ceiling. Perhaps a spider.

He had had a dream the other night about the girl Becka. Together they had spent the day, running around the university campus in the hot weather, drinking cola and sweating and sitting at café tables and attracting bees.

“Hey,” she had said, in almost the exact manner as Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, “Let’s make love.”

So they had gone back to her room, and Bill could feel himself grow tense and shaky in anticipation. But it was then he had noticed that something was wrong.

Becka was wrapped up in some sort of burlap sack. It was cinched around her neck and wrists and waist and ankles by a system of leather belts. What was worse, occasional rips in the space revealed what seemed to be an abundance of fur.

Was Becka not human then?

He had read of pornography (actually, he had read about it in an interview with J.G. Ballard) where men became excited by the prospect of a woman wrapped up in an old cloth sack. Face hidden, body a shapeless mystery…did these men actually garner sexual excitement from the prospect of unwrapping some sort of hideous mummy? To forever anticipate that the gift-wrapped girl might be some monstrous horror of seeping pustules, boils, scars, lesions, burnt tissue. Or, perhaps she could be beautiful, or nothing at all.

At any rate, the dream had seemed so real, had morphed so seamlessly into his current memories and impressions of Becka that he felt that he couldn’t quite stand to think of her in a sexual manner anymore. It made him feel like gagging, as if he had swallowed fur.

They are each given plastic cups full of a cherry-red liquid that has no taste. Bill swallows his dutifully, sits back, closes his eyes, and turns on his music. It is Strauss’ “Blue Danube”, just what he needs for a round-trip ticket to the cosmos, and he feels the first few giddy stirrings of anticipation inside as he realizes the stuff is taking effect.

Pinpoints of color explode like miniature bombs behind his eyes, fireworks of sound shoot across the room like stereophonic missiles, and he recedes into the distance.

***

It is in a nursing home room, where an old man is dying, that he comes to a sort of wakefulness. Has he been dreaming, then? It made little sense if one thought about it consciously. Experiments with LSD 25 or whatever were always carried out under controlled conditions, in a clinical setting…not in some crowded college lecture hall. The room is hot and stifling; the sunlight slants in through the blinds, occasionally obscured by clouds that turn the entire room a dim grey.

A hatchet-faced boy, a German of obvious German stock (Aryan blonde with blue eyes and excellent facial geometrysits with his girlfriend, two rigid impressions in the gathering murk. He looks at them as they sit there, the girl having her coat wrapped around her forearm. She is beautiful and terrible as a Japanese sunrise.

The old man is fat, has a shock of frizzy gray hair, and horn-rimmed spectacles. He sits up, holds out his arms in a Jesus Christ pose, and says, “I have betrayed the Lord.”

No one knows how to respond. I make that the German boy is not entirely real, perhaps some sort of convenient android just shipped in from Andromeda aboard a space-going freighter. The lines of his face are rigid and set, his eyes are twin pools of obsidian. His teeth are too perfect.

(I, the Narrator, realize I have built robots. Or, rather, I have built them up in the public mind, because one of the jobs I had in telecommunications was to program the dialogue for a toy robot on a children’s program. The robot is a fraud, a puppet; it doesn’t really think. But I can write the script, correct? And it will make the sounds I program it to make, but privately I think the little thing (that looks like a waste paper basket with legs) is sort of depressed about the subordinate role it fulfills. You know actors, always wanting to improvise lines.

So maybe the robots are taking over. And what does it really mean, this move toward ‘artificial intelligence”? Will our puppet grow perturbed at always having to mouth other people’s words? Maybe there is a stream of flowing consciousness we can’t understand, some way for the inanimate to become sentient, to begin to think and feel. How long before we live in a world where tiny machines build tiny machines, to infest the human body like a virus and take over from within. I shudder at the thought.)

Bill blinks, and the scene shifts as though he were drunk. A jump-cut, like a moment of consciousness edited out, clipped from the cut-up of life. The two German students are lolling with the dying uncle on an immense bed, while he flails about in agony. Each of them has their tongue extended like a writhing cobra, licking the top of his dirty old head. Bill gets up to leave, having had quite enough of this.

He goes out into the hall. Just down the hall is some sort of sitting room. He goes inside. It looks to be a comfortable lounge.

The doctor is standing at a podium, shuffling papers.

“Gentleman and ladies, that is, hostages to fortune. We have called you all here today for the express purpose of showing you some top secret films…stuff the CIA has assured us must remain hidden from the public at large, lest the world erupt into panic or sink into a kind of apathetic malaise, or some such social disintegration result from the, well, uh, anyway, where was I? Ah yes. These films have been smuggled, at the cost of not a few lives, from the nameless and secret cults and organizations which produced them. They concern the intergalactic conspiracy, that is the conspiracy to populate planets with hybridized beings that are partly human, partly…well, that’s what we’d like to know. At any rate, relax, and let us begin.”

And Bill sits back on a divan, and next to him, a man in a Victorian suit with a great, white handlebar moustache sits with a miniature bleeding goat on top of his head. Bill does a double-take; maybe it is just an exceptionally ugly hat. No, it was simply a frizzy shock of white hair; Bill sees that the man is an albino.

The film begins.

At first there were a number of boring shots of men speaking, men in thick horn-rimmed glasses who were undeniable experts when not indulging in black scientific studies. This faded, gradually, to a panorama of marching boots, as a column of soldiers seemed to march into outer space from some bombed-out, broken Eastern European hellhole of a village. Interspersed were scenes cut from WW2 films of the bombing of London, Hamburg, Dresden…columns of emaciated prisoners marched to their death, and a mad man putting on goggles in anticipation of the great flash of a nuclear test.

A phony town decimated by a phony bomb. Mannequins posed in realistic situations, little girls with dead wigs of fright pose at old tube radios as the all-consuming fire sweeps over them, disintegrating their plastic frames into shadow shows of ash. Did time really stop, frozen forever on concrete walls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t know.

The boots march into a constellation, and right away Bill sees that the stars are forming a giant hammer and sickle. This is a communist propaganda film.

Two boys sit on a bed, while a third man, an older man, sits down between them, as if he is some sort of pervert.

“But daddy, what is democracy?”

“A poor excuse to let the rabble control the roost. When the workers finally control the means of production, all else will fall into place.”

“Even better,” says the apple-cheeked boy to his left. “All else will become infinite.”

The stars of the phony Hollywood constellation form into a giant hammer and sickle symbol, once more. The boots march on.

To his horror, Bill realizes that he is dressed for a costume ball he wasn’t invited to. He is dressed in 18th century garb, with a powdered wig, and someone makes out he is the Marquis de Sade.

A perturbed little man approaches him, puts his fists on his hips and says, “Ah, Marquis, how dare you hide yourself away from little Jacques!”

Suddenly, Bill is picked up, bodily, and hoisted by the shoulders into a filthy bathroom. Jacques forces him in front of a mirror, and reaches up to stick something in his eye. It is apparently some sort of contact lens.

Bill sees that he has grown haggard in his role as the Marquis. One half of his vision is blurred, the other half is crystal clarity. Is this the image he wants to project for the world?

He leans forward. The cup of cherry-red liquid sits on the little desk in front of him. Below, the doctor is still shuffling papers. People are clearing their throats, coughing, someone farts and giggles. Bill gets up, gets his books, walks out.