Poe's Children (21 page)

At once I was cold with terror. I shook like a victim of electricity, for I knew what viewpoint I’d shared. It was still watching me, indifferent as outer space—and it filled the sky. If I looked up I would see its eyes, or eye, if it had anything that I would recognize as such. My neck shivered as I held my head down. But I would have to look up in a moment, for I could feel the face, or whatever was up there, leaning closer—reaching down for me.

If I hadn’t broken through my suffocating panic I would have been crushed to nothing. But my teeth tore my lip, and allowed me to scream. Released, I ran desperately, heedless of quicksand. The dunes crept back from me, the squirming beach glowed, the light flickered in the rhythm of the chanting. I was spared being engulfed—but when at last I reached the dunes, or was allowed to reach them, the dark massive presence still hovered overhead.

I clambered scrabbling up the path. My sobbing gasps filled my mouth with sand. My wild flight was from nothing that I’d seen. I was fleeing the knowledge, deep-rooted and undeniable, that what I perceived blotting out the sky was nothing but an acceptable metaphor. Appalling though the presence was, it was only my mind’s version of what was there—a way of letting me glimpse it without going mad at once.

V

I have not seen Neal since—at least, not in a form that anyone else would recognize.

Next day, after a night during which I drank all the liquor I could find to douse my appalled thoughts and insights, I discovered that I couldn’t leave. I pretended to myself that I was going to the beach to search for Neal. But the movements began at once; the patterns stirred. As I gazed, dully entranced, I felt something grow less dormant in my head, as though my skull had turned into a shell.

Perhaps I stood engrossed by the beach for hours. Movement distracted me: the skimming of a windblown patch of sand. As I glanced at it I saw that it resembled a giant mask, its features ragged and crumbling. Though its eyes and mouth couldn’t keep their shape, it kept trying to resemble Neal’s face. As it slithered whispering toward me I fled toward the path, moaning.

That night he came into the bungalow. I hadn’t dared go to bed; I dozed in a chair, and frequently woke trembling. Was I awake when I saw his huge face squirming and transforming as it crawled out of the wall? Certainly I could hear his words, though his voice was the inhuman chorus I’d experienced on the beach. Worse, when I opened my eyes to glimpse what might have been only a shadow, not a large unstable form fading back into the substance of the wall, for a few seconds I could still hear that voice.

Each night, once the face had sunk back into the wall as into quicksand, the voice remained longer—and each night, struggling to break loose from the prison of my chair, I understood more of its revelations. I tried to believe all this was my imagination, and so, in a sense, it was. The glimpses of Neal were nothing more than acceptable metaphors for what Neal had become, and what I was becoming. My mind refused to perceive the truth more directly, yet I was possessed by a temptation, vertiginous and sickening, to learn what that truth might be.

For a while I struggled. I couldn’t leave, but perhaps I could write. When I found that however bitterly I fought I could think of nothing but the beach, I wrote this. I hoped that writing about it might release me, but of course the more one thinks of the beach, the stronger its hold becomes.

Now I spend most of my time on the beach. It has taken me months to write this. Sometimes I see people staring at me from the bungalows. Do they wonder what I’m doing? They will find out when their time comes—everyone will. Neal must have satisfied it for a while; for the moment it is slower. But that means little. Its time is not like ours.

Each day the pattern is clearer. My pacing helps. Once you have glimpsed the pattern you must go back to read it, over and over. I can feel it growing in my mind. The sense of expectancy is overwhelming. Of course that sense was never mine. It was the hunger of the beach.

My time is near. The large moist prints that surround mine are more pronounced—the prints of what I am becoming. Its substance is everywhere, stealthy and insidious. Today, as I looked at the bungalows, I saw them change; they grew like fossils of themselves. They looked like dreams of the beach, and that is what they will become.

The voice is always with me now. Sometimes the congealing haze seems to mouth at me. At twilight the dunes edge forward to guard the beach. When the beach is dimmest I see other figures pacing out the pattern. Only those whom the beach has touched would see them; their outlines are unstable—some look more like coral than flesh. The quicksands make us trace the pattern, and he stoops from the depths beyond the sky to watch. The sea feeds me.

Often now I have what may be a dream. I glimpse what Neal has become, and how that is merely a fragment of the imprint which it will use to return to our world. Each time I come closer to recalling the insight when I wake. As my mind changes, it tries to prepare me for the end. Soon I shall be what Neal is. I tremble uncontrollably, I feel deathly sick, my mind struggles desperately not to know. Yet in a way I am resigned. After all, even if I managed to flee the beach, I could never escape the growth. I have understood enough to know that it would absorb me in time, when it becomes the world.

Body

Brian Evenson

I. BODY

I
have been privately removed to St. Sebastian’s Correctional Facility and Haven for the Wayward, where they are fitting me for a new mind, and body too. Most of my distress, they believe, results from having a wayward body and no knowledge of how to manage it. As mine is a body which does not sit easy with the world, they have chosen to begin again from scratch.

The body,
says Brother Johanssen,
is not simple flesh staunching blood and slung over bones, but a way of slipping and spilling through the world.
While others slip like water through the world, I am always bottling the world up. The only way I can come unbottled is to crack the world apart.
One cannot refashion flesh and blood,
Brother Johanssen tells me,
but one can refashion the paths that flesh and blood take through the world.

In a way you can remake the flesh and blood too,
whispers Skarmus,
or unmake it, as you know, dear boy.
It is late one midnight, and I lie bound to the slab. I have no answer to this. His fingers are pushing through my hair. In the dark, I hear the grim smile in his voice.
That you hear what others see
, Brother Johanssen tells me,
is but further index of your illness.

It is true, as Skarmus says, that I have acquired a certain skill at unmaking flesh and blood, dividing it and sectioning it into new creatures and forms as a means of transforming the distress of my wayward body into pleasure. Put into the brothers’ terms, the only commerce I can stomach is with the dead. In a little time, I know to work away my distress by transforming another into a stripped-and lopped-off dark lump of flies. They do not know all of this, though they surely suspect. For what they do know, I am conscripted in St. Sebastian’s, subject to all things as I prepare to take up another, purer body.

Four buildings, four stations, four doors. Before I may enter any station, I am required to salute the door frame of the remaining three. First lintel, then post, then lintel again, addressed in such fashion first with my right mitt, then with my left, then my body must spin sharply and stride to the next door.

Skarmus is with me as my private demon, tasked by the brothers to ensure I meet all proscription regarding motion, that I salute door frames in proper order and fashion, that I locomote as they would have me do. I am to be impeded and interrupted by him. All is an effort and the brothers’ belief is that my mind in the face of that effort must opt for the construction of another body.

There must, for reasons never explained to me, be an interval of five seconds between each gesture, no more, no less. I must regulate seconds as Skarmus challenges me with hands and voice. When my movements are irregular, the intervals inexact, I am forced to begin again. If I fail a second time, Skarmus is allowed to tighten the flap over my mouth until I can barely respire and slowly lose consciousness.

I cannot know if at night Skarmus whispers his own opinions or if his words are part of the brothers’ larger plan for me. I attempt not to respond to his whispers or actions, attempt as far as possible to ignore Skarmus and coax him off guard. I have twice, despite the padded restraints engaging my hands and feet, despite the system wiring my jaw closed, beaten Skarmus senseless. Indeed, I would have beaten him dead and attempted, despite my restraints, commerce with what was left of him, had not the brothers rapidly intervened.

Four stations, then, as follows: the Living, the Instruction, the Restriction, the Resurrection. I have entered all stations save the Resurrection. Here, Brother Johanssen believes, I am not yet prepared to go.

The Living: I am strapped flat around chest, wrists, ankles, throat. The mask is undone and set aside, the lights extinguished. I am allowed to sleep if I can so manage with Skarmus mumbling over me.

At some point, lights flash on. A tube is forced between the wires encasing my mouth and I am fed.

Brother Johanssen arrives, the jawscrews are loosened, I am allowed a moment of untrammeled expression.

“How are you, brother?” Brother Johanssen asks. “Are you uncovering a new body within your skin?”

“I have a new body,” I tell him. “I am utterly changed. I have given up evil and become a purely normal fellow.”

He shakes his head, smiling thinly. “You believe me so credible?” he asks. He makes a gesture and the jawscrews are tightened down, the mask re-initiated.

You must learn to deceive him,
whispers Skarmus.
You must master better the art of the lie.

Then we are up and outside and walking. The weights and baffles and mitts, always varied slightly from one day to the next. The restrictions, Skarmus’s constant tug and thrust as I walk. My body remains aching and sore, unsure on its feet.

Skarmus is beside me, a half pace behind. Brother Johanssen is somewhere behind, out of sight, the other brothers as well. I am at the center of a world whose sole purpose is to circle about me.

The Instruction: I am made to listen to Brother Johanssen, Skarmus still whispering in my ear.
That which is wayward must be angled forward, the body surrendered for another,
Brother Johanssen preaches. I have, I am told, been wandering all the years of my life in the darkness of my imperfect body. Only the brothers can bring me into light.

You cannot be brought into the so-called light,
whispers Skarmus.
You shall never survive it. For you there is no so-called light but only so-called darkness.

I fail to understand the role of Skarmus. He seems intent on undoing all that Brother Johanssen attempts. Together, it is as if they are trying to tear me apart.

The beauty of the world,
Brother Johanssen is saying,
objective, impersonal. For a body such as that which you still persist in wearing, an affront. Affreux. You must acquire a body which will live with beauty rather than against it.

There is only against,
states Skarmus.

The Restriction: when I am inattentive, when I resist, when I follow Skarmus’s advice rather than that of the good brother, when I fail in my tasks and motions. The mask is tightened almost to suffocation, the flaps zipped down to block my ears, eyes, nose, the hands chained and dragged up above the head. The back of the rubber suit is loosened, parted, a range of sensations scattered over it or into it by devices I cannot perceive. At some point sweat begins to crease my back, or perhaps welts and blood.

It all revolves around not knowing. I cannot say if it is pain or pleasure I feel, the line between the two so easily traversable in the artificial distance from my own flesh. The dull thud coming distanced through my blocked ears, the flash of sensation flung across the skull at first and then barely perceptible, the damp smell within the leather mask.

“How are you, brother?” Brother Johanssen asks. “Have you found your new body?”

“I have a new body now, dear brother,” I say. I strain against the straps. “I am a changed man.”

He shakes his finger back and forth over me slowly. “I see you take me for a fool,” he says.

A brief flash through the stations, a day in the space of a moment, my mind at some distance from my body and the light goes off. I feel fingers in my hair.
You cannot believe any of this,
Skarmus says.
You must not allow them to take away what you are.

Lintel, post, lintel with right. Lintel, post, lintel with left. The muffled blows the mitt offers with each strike.

A slow turn, the foot coming up. Stumbling to the next door, Skarmus clinging to one of my legs.

“You are not prepared for the Resurrection,” says Brother Johanssen, leaning benevolently over me.

You’ll never be ready,
Skarmus whispers.

The chains tighten. I feel my back stripped bare. In the darkness inside my mask, I see streaks of light.

I open my mouth to speak. They are already screwing my jaw down.

A remembered ruin of bodies and myself panting among them, yet with no complete memory of having taken them apart.

I am different from anyone else in the world.

He is smiling, waiting for me to speak. I close my eyes. He pries them open, waits, waits. Finally lets them go, tightens the jawscrews down until my teeth ache and grate.

Skarmus falls slightly ahead of me and for a moment I feel myself and my body clearly my own again. He stumbles and I have my mitts on either side of his head and am holding his head still as I strike through it with my own masked head, as I lift him up to bring the side of his skull down against my muffled knee. Were I not so restrained and softened by padding he would be dead. As it is, it is a sort of awkward game.

I try to snap his head to one side and break his neck, but the mitts give slightly and the neck groans but refuses to snap. There is a flurry of bodies and Skarmus is dragged away and other hands are holding me down, pulling the mask off, holding my own head down. I see the brief glint of the long needle, feel it pricked into my skull, just above the rim of my eye.

“An inch more,” says Brother Johanssen. “A simple rotation of the wrist, brother, and you shall have little relation to any body at all. Is that what you choose?”

I move my eyes no, feel the pressure of the needle.

“Are you telling me that all our time has been wasted?” He looks at me long, without expression, the needle an everpresent pressure, a red blot now drawing itself into my vision. “It is too late for a full cure,” says Brother Johanssen. “Your body is too stubborn in its ways. We can redirect it but slightly.”

Brother Johanssen gestures and I feel the needle slick back out, see it fluxed and dripping blood, moving away. There lies Skarmus, his jaw blistered black and blue. He is silent for once.

“The Resurrection then,” says Brother Johanssen as blood curls over my eye. “This is all we can do. May God forgive us.”

II. SHOE

In the polished ceiling of the Living, in the few moments I have free of the mask, I see the flesh above my eye gone dark and turgid, swelling like a second eye. Below it the original eye wavers and falls dim. In a few awakenings its vision is altogether gone, the enormous fist of death beginning to open in its place.

They sedate me and scrape the eye from the socket and drain the ichor from it and scald the socket clean. Skarmus speaks muffled, morphined, his jaw wrapped, his voice mumbled.

I was right,
he means to say.
I was right all along.

His gestures of impediment have subsided, seem half-hearted at best. I am allowed to touch each door frame largely unimpeded, move in my wires and chains into the Resurrection at last.

It is a simple station, a single room, a low light in the center of it. Brother Johanssen is already there, waiting, at attention, his simple garments exchanged for brighter brocaded robes.

I am made to sit. I am then strapped in place and into a head-brace locked so I am forced to regard him.

“These are the initial terms of the Resurrection,” he says:

Top Lift

Eyelet

Aglet

Grommet

Vamp

He holds it up, cupped in his hand. He displays it in the light.

“Do you see the curve here?” asks Brother Johanssen a few sessions later, tracing along the side. “Employ your imagination. What does it conjure up?”

They are trying to change you,
whispers Skarmus.

“On a woman’s body, brother. What does it recall?”

He brings it close, traces the curves, holds it close to my face, describes the minor shadings and traces. When I close my eyes, Brother Johanssen commands Skarmus to hold them open, both of them, the missing and the whole. He is touching the shoe, caressing it, speaking still in a way that makes the shoe steam and glimmer, glister in the odd light as if threatening to become something else.

Quarter,
he says.

Cuff.

Counter.

Heel.

When I wake he is there, leaning over me, my jaw already screwed open. “Do you accept the fruits of your new faith?” he asks.

“What?” I say.

“What?” he says. He stands and begins to weave away. “What?” he repeats, “What?”

Throat,
someone says behind me.

Tongue,
someone says.

He dims the central light, disappears himself somewhere behind me. A square of light as big as myself appears, flashes onto the wall before me.

You are in it,
says Skarmus.
Too late to step back now.

The square of light goes dark, is exchanged for the image of the forepart of a woman’s shoe, the dip between the first and second toe captured in the low cleft of the vamp. It flashes away and is replaced by pallid white flesh, the dip of a dress, the slow curve and fall of the woman’s body.

There may be a resemblance,
says Skarmus.
Yet it is entirely superficial.