John Langan is the author of a short story collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime Books, 2008), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade Books, 2009). His stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as in anthologies including The Living Dead (Night Shade Books, 2009) and Poe (Solaris, 2009). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of cats, and whatever’s scratching at the walls.
“IS THAT—DO YOU SEE—”
Already, Rick was braking, reaching for the hazards. Connie turned from the passenger-side window at whose streaky surface she had spent the last half-hour staring. Eyes on something ahead, her husband was easing the steering wheel left, toward the meridian. Following the line of his gaze, she saw, next to the guardrail about ten yards in front of them, a smallish red and white container. “What?” she said. “The cooler?”
“It’s not a cooler,” Rick said, bringing the Forrester to a stop. His voice was still sharp with the edge of their argument.
“What do you—” She understood before she could complete her question. “Jesus—is that a—”
“A cooler,” Rick said, “albeit of a different sort.”
The car was in neutral, the parking brake on, Rick’s door open in the time it took her to arrive at her next sentence. “What’s it doing here?”
“I have no idea,” he said, and stepped out of the car. She leaned forward, watching him trot to the red and white plastic box with the red cross on it. It resembled nothing so much as the undersized cooler in which she and her roommates had stored their wine coolers during undergrad: the same peaked top that would slide back when you pressed the buttons on either side of it. Rick circled around it once clockwise, once counterclockwise, and squatted on his haunches beside it. He was wearing denim shorts and the faded green Mickey Mouse T-shirt that he refused to allow Connie to claim for the rag drawer, even though it had been washed so many times it was practically translucent. (It was the outfit he chose whenever they went to visit his father.) He appeared to be reading something on the lid. He stood, turning his head to squint up and down this stretch of the Thruway, empty in both directions. He blew out his breath and ran his hand through his hair—the way he did when he was pretending to debate a question he’d already decided—then bent, put his hands on the cooler, and picked it up. Apparently, it was lighter than he’d anticipated, because it practically leapt into the air. Almost race-walking, he carried the container towards the car.
Connie half expected him to hand it to her. Instead, he continued past her to the trunk. She tilted the rearview mirror to see him balancing the cooler against his hip and unlocking the trunk. When he thunked the lid down, his hands were empty.
The answer was so obvious she didn’t want to ask the question; nonetheless, once Rick was back behind the wheel, drawing his seatbelt across, she said, “What exactly are you doing?”
Without looking at her, he said, “We can’t just leave it there.”
“If the cell phone were charged, we could call 911.”
“Connie—”
“I’m just saying. You wanted to know why that kind of stuff was so important, well, here you are.”
“You—” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the highway was clear. As he accelerated onto it, he said, “You know what? You’re right. If I’d charged the cell phone last night like you asked me to, we could dial 911 and have a state trooper take this off our hands. That’s absolutely true. Since the phone is dead, however, we need another plan. We’re about forty, forty-five minutes from the house. I say we get home as quickly as we can and start calling around the local hospitals. Maybe this is for someone in one of them. In any event, I’m sure they’ll know who to call to find out where this is supposed to go.”
“Do they even do transplants in Wiltwyck?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think Penrose might.”
“We could stop at the next state trooper barracks.”
“The nearest one is our exit, up 209. We’re as quick going to the house.”
“You’re sure there’s something in there?”
“I didn’t look, but when I lifted it, I heard ice moving inside.”
“It didn’t look that heavy.”
“It wasn’t. But I don’t know how much a heart, or a kidney, would weigh. Not too much, I think.”
“I don’t know, I just—” She glanced over her shoulder. “I mean, Jesus, how does something like that wind up in the middle of the Thruway? How does that happen?”
Rick shrugged. “They don’t always hire the most professional guys to transport these things. Maybe someone’s tail flap was down, or they swerved to avoid a deer in the road and the cooler went tumbling out.”
“Surely not.”
“Well, if you knew the answer to the question—”
For a second, their argument threatened to tighten its coils around them again. Connie said, “What about the lid? I thought you were reading something on it.”
“There’s a sticker on top that looks as if it had some kind of information, but the writing’s all blurred. Must have been that storm a little while ago.”
“So it’s been sitting here at least that long.”
“Seems likely. Maybe that was what happened—maybe the truck skidded and that caused the cooler to come loose.”
“Wouldn’t you stop and go back for something like that? Someone’s life could be on the line.”
“Could be the driver never noticed, was too busy trying to keep himself from crashing into the guardrail.”
The scenario sounded plausible enough—assuming, that is, you accepted Rick’s assertion about underqualified drivers employed to convey freshly harvested organs from donor to recipient. Which was, now that Connie thought about it, sufficiently venal and depressing likely to be the truth. “What if it’s supposed to be heading north, to Albany?”
“There’s probably still enough time, even if whoever it is has to drive back the way we came.”
“Maybe they could fly it wherever it needs to go. Doesn’t Penrose do that?”
“I think so.”
Already, she was buying into Rick’s plan. Would it make that much difference to call the hospitals from their house instead of the police station? Equipped with a fully charged cell phone, they could have been rushing whatever was packed in the cooler’s ice to the surgical team who at this moment must be in the midst of preparations to receive it. Connie could picture herself and Rick striding into the Emergency Room at Wiltwyck, the cooler under Rick’s arm, a green-garbed surgeon waiting with gloves outstretched. With the cell inert, though, home might be their next best option. Based on her experiences with them at an embarrassing number of stops for speeding, the Wiltwyck troopers would require more time than whoever was waiting for this cooler’s contents could spare for her and Rick to make clear to them the gravity of the situation.
That’s not true, she thought. You know that isn’t true. You’re just pissed because that guy wouldn’t agree to plead down to ten miles an hour over the speed limit. She was justifying Rick’s plan, shoring up his ambition to be part of the story—an important part, the random, passing stranger who turns out to be crucial to yanking someone at death’s very doorway back from that black rectangle. Because… because it was exciting to feel yourself caught up in a narrative like this, one that offered you the opportunity to be part of something bigger than yourself.
Rick had the speedometer to the other side of eighty-five. Connie reached her left hand across and squeezed his leg, lightly. He did not remove his hands from the wheel.
FOUR HOURS LATER, THEY WERE STARING AT THE cooler sitting on the kitchen table. Its surface was pebbled plastic; Connie wondered if that contributed in any way to keeping its contents chilled. The red cross stenciled on its lid was faded, a shade lighter than the bottom half of the cooler, and beginning to flake off. The symbol didn’t look like your typical red cross. This design was narrow at the join, the sides of each arm curving outwards on their way to its end—the four of which were rounded, like the edges of a quartet of axes. Connie had seen this style of cross, or one close to it, before: Alexa, the first girl with whom she’d shared an apartment, and who had been more Catholic than the Pope, had counted a cross in this style among her religious jewelry. A Maltese cross? Cross of Malta? Something like that, although Connie remembered her old roommate’s cross ornamented with additional designs—little pictures, she thought; of what, she couldn’t recall. To be honest, this version of the cross seemed less a religious icon and more the image of something else—an abstract flower, perhaps, or an elaborate keyhole. For a moment, the four red lines opening out resembled nothing so much as the pupil of some oversized, alien eye, but that was ridiculous.
What it meant that the cooler resting on the blond wood of their kitchen table bore this emblem, she could not say. Did the Red Cross have subdivisions, local branches, and might this be one of their symbols? She’d never heard of such a thing, but she was a manager at Target; this was hardly her area of expertise.
Rick said, “Maybe it’s a Mob thing.”
“What?” Connie looked across the table at him, slouched back in his chair, arms folded over his chest.
“I said, Maybe it’s a Mob thing.”
“What do you mean?”
He straightened. “Maybe it’s part of someone who, you know, messed with the Mob. Or someone they had a contract on.”
“Like what—a finger?”
“Finger, hand—proof that the job was done.”
“Seriously?”
He shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know—I mean, the Mob? Transporting—what? Severed body parts in medical coolers? Wasn’t that a movie?”
“Was it?”
“Yes—we saw it together. It was on TNT or TBS or something. Joe Pesci was in it. Remember: he’s a hit man and he’s got these heads in a duffel bag—”
“Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag.”
“That’s it!”
“So there was a movie. What does that prove?”
“It’s just—”
“Or maybe it’s some kind of black market thing, a kidney for sale to the highest bidder, no questions asked.”
“Isn’t that an urban legend?”
“Where do you think these things come from?”
“I—”
“Look—all I’m saying is, we’ve exhausted the legitimate avenues, so it makes sense to consider other possibilities.”
Connie took a breath. “Granted. But we don’t even know what’s inside the cooler—if there’s anything in it.”
“You’re the one who said we shouldn’t open it.”
“I know. It’s—if there’s something in it, then we need to be careful about not contaminating it.”
“Are you listening to yourself? We don’t know if there’s anything in the cooler, so we shouldn’t be too concerned about it, but we shouldn’t open it, in case there is something in there. What are we supposed to do?”
Before she could answer, Rick pushed himself up from his chair and stalked to the refrigerator, the bottles in whose door rattled as he yanked it open. Connie bit the remark ready to leap off her tongue. Instead, she stood and leaned over to have another look at the square sticker on the cooler’s lid. There were no identifying names on the label, no hospital or transport service logos, no barcode, even, which, in the age of global computer tracking, struck her as stranger than the absence of a corporate ID. There were only four or five lines of smeared black ink, unintelligible except for one word that she and Rick had agreed read “Howard” and another that he guessed was “orchid” but of which Connie could identify no more than the initial “o.” Now, as her gaze roamed over the ink blurred into swirls and loops, she had the impression that the words which had been written on this sticker hadn’t been English, the letters hadn’t been any she would have recognized. Some quality of the patterns into which the writing had been distorted suggested an alphabet utterly unfamiliar, which might smear into a configuration resembling “Howard” or “orchid” by the merest coincidence.
God, you’re worse than Rick. She resumed her seat as he returned from the fridge, an open bottle of Magic Hat in hand. Not that she wanted a drink, exactly, but his failure to ask her if she did sent Connie on her own mission to the fridge. They were out of hard cider, damnit. She had intended to stop at Hannaford for a quick shop on the way home, then the cooler had appeared and obscured all other concerns. They were almost out of milk, too, and butter. She selected a Magic Hat for herself and swung the door shut.
Rick had set his beer on the table and was standing with his back to her, bent forward slightly, his arms out, his hands on the cooler.
“Rick?” Connie said. “What are you doing?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“Very funny,” she said, crossing the kitchen to him. He was staring at the cooler as if he could will its contents visible. He said, “We have to open it.”
“But if there’s something inside it—”
“I know, I know. I can’t see any other choice. We called Wiltwyck, and they didn’t know anything about it. Neither did Penrose or Albany Med or Westchester Med. The transport services they gave us the numbers for weren’t missing any shipments—one said they aren’t even using coolers like this anymore. The cops were useless. Hell, that guy at the sheriff’s thought it was probably just someone’s cooler. Maybe there’ll be some kind of information inside that’ll tell us where this is supposed to go.”
“What if it’s a Mob thing?”
“Do you really believe that?”
“No, but I could be wrong, in which case, what would we do?”
“Get rid of it as quickly as possible. Burn it. I don’t think there’s any way it could be traced to us.”
To her surprise, Connie said, “All right. Go ahead.”
Rick didn’t ask if she were sure. He pressed in the catches on the lid and slid it back. As Connie inclined toward it, he drew the cooler toward them. It scraped against the table; its contents shifted with a sound like gravel rasping. Connie had been anticipating a strong odor washing out of the cooler’s interior, raw meat full of blood; instead, there was the faintest blue hint of air long-chilled and another, even fainter trace of iodine. Rick’s arm was blocking her view; she nudged him. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me see.”
He shifted to the right. The cooler was full of ice, chips of it heaped in shining piles around, around—
She registered the color first, the dark purple of a ripe eggplant, shot through with veins of lighter purple—blue, she thought, some shade of blue. It was maybe as wide as a small dinner plate, thicker at the center than at its scalloped circumference. At five—no, six spots around its margin, the surface puckered, the color around each spot shading into a rich rose. The texture of the thing was striated, almost coarse.
“What the fuck?”
“I know—right?”
“Rick—what is this?”
“A placenta?”
“That is not a placenta.”
“Like you’ve seen one.”
“As a matter of fact, I have. There was a show on Lifetime—I can’t remember what it was called, but it was about women giving birth, in living color, no detail spared. I saw plenty of placentas, and trust me, that is not a placenta.”
“Okay, it’s not a placenta. So what is it?”
“I—is it even human?”
“You’re saying what? that it’s an animal?”
“I don’t know—some kind of jellyfish?”
“Looks too solid, doesn’t it? Besides, wouldn’t you store a jellyfish in water?”
“I guess.”
Rick started to reach into the cooler. Connie grabbed his wrist. “Jesus! What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d take it out so we could have a better look at it.” He tugged his hand free.
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I’m pretty sure it isn’t someone’s kidney.”
“Granted, but you can’t just—it could be dangerous, toxic.”
“Really.”
“There are animals whose skin is poisonous. Haven’t you heard of Poison Dart Frogs?”
“Oh.” He lowered his hand. “Fair enough.” He stepped away from the cooler. “Sweetie—what is this?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure we can say what it isn’t. I doubt there’s anyone whose life depends on receiving this, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t attached to any Mob informer. Nor was it feeding a fetus nutrients for nine months. That leaves us with—I don’t have the faintest idea. Some kind of animal.”
“I don’t know.”
Connie shrugged. “The world’s a big place. There are all kinds of crazy things living at the bottom of the ocean. Or it could be from someplace else—deep underground. Maybe it’s a new discovery that was being transported to a museum.”
Rick grunted. “Okay. Let’s assume this was on its way to an eager research scientist. What’s our next move?”
“Another round of phone calls, I guess.”
“You want to start on that, and I’ll get dinner going?”
She wasn’t hungry, but she said, “Sure.”
Rick reached for the cooler. “Relax,” he said as she tensed, ready to seize his arms. Steadying the cooler with his left hand, he closed it with the right. The lid snicked shut.
NO SURPRISE: SHE DREAMED ABOUT THE THING IN THE cooler. She was in Rick’s father’s room at the nursing home (even asleep, she was unable to think of him as “Gary” or “Mr. Wilson,” let alone “Dad”). Rick’s father was in the green vinyl recliner by the window, his face tilted up to the sunlight pouring over him in a way that reminded Connie of a large plant feeding on light. The green Jets sweatsuit he was wearing underscored the resemblance. His eyes were closed, his lips moving in the constant murmur that had marked the Alzheimer’s overwhelming the last of his personality. In the flood of brightness, he looked younger than fifty-eight, as if he might be Rick’s young uncle, and not the father not old enough for the disease that had consumed him with the relentless patience of a python easing itself around its prey.
Connie was standing with her back to the room’s hefty dresser, the top of which was heaped with orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. The air was full of the briny smell of seaweed baking on the beach, which she knew was the flowers’ scent.
Although she hadn’t noticed him enter the room, Rick was kneeling in front of his father, his hands held up and out as if offering the man a gift. His palms cupped the thing from the cooler. Its edges overflowed his hands. In the dense sunlight, the thing was even darker, more rather than less visible. If the scene in front of her were a photograph, the thing was a dab of black paint rising off its surface.
“Here,” Rick said to his father. “I brought it for you.” When his father did not respond, Rick said, “Dad.”
The man opened his eyes and tilted his head in his son’s direction. Connie didn’t think he saw what Rick was offering him. He croaked, “Bloom.”
His father’s eyes narrowed, and his face swung toward Connie. He was weeping, tears coursing down his cheeks like lines of fire in the sunlight. “Bloom,” he said.
Almost before she knew she was awake, she was sitting up in bed. Although she was certain it must be far into the night, one of those hours you only saw when the phone rang to announce some family tragedy, the digital clock insisted it was two minutes after midnight. She had been asleep for an hour. She turned to Rick and found his side of the bed empty.
There was no reason for her heart to start pounding. Rick stayed up late all the time, watching Nightline or Charlie Rose. For the seven years Connie had known him, he had been a light sleeper, prone to insomnia, a tendency that had worsened with his father’s unexpected and sudden decline. She had sought him out enough times in the beginning of their relationship to be sure that there was no cause for her to leave the bed. She would find him on the couch, bathed in the TV’s glow, a bag of microwave popcorn open on his lap. So prepared was she for him to be there that, when she reached the bottom of the stairs and discovered the living room dark, something like panic straightened her spine. “Rick?” she said. “Honey?”
Of course he was in the kitchen. She glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye the same instant he said, “I’m in here.” By the streetlight filtering through the window, she saw him seated at the kitchen table, wearing a white T-shirt and boxers, his arms on the table, his hands on the keyboard of his father’s laptop, which was open and on. The cooler, which he had pushed back to make room for the computer, appeared to be closed. (She wasn’t sure why that detail made her heart slow.) She walked down the hallway to him, saying, “Couldn’t sleep, huh?”
“Nah.” His eyes did not leave the computer screen.
“You’re like this every time we visit your Dad.”
She rubbed his back. “You’re doing all you can for him. It’s a good place.”
“Yeah.”
On the laptop’s screen, a reddish sphere hung against a backdrop of stars. Connie recognized the painting from the NASA website, and the next picture Rick brought up, of a rough plane spread out under a starry sky, at the center of which a cluster of cartoonishly fat arrows identified a handful of the dots of light as the sun and planets of the solar system. A third image showed eight green circles arranged concentrically around a bright point, all of it inside one end of an enormous red ellipse.
The screen after that was a photo of a massive stone monument, a rectangular block stood on its short end, another block laid across its top to form a T-shape. The front of the tall stone was carved with a thick line that descended from high on the right to almost the bottom of the left, where it curved back right again; in the curve, a representation of a four-legged animal Connie could not identify crouched. The image that followed was another painting, this one of a trio of circular structures set in the lee of a broad hill, the diameter of each defined by a thick wall, the interior stood with T-shaped monoliths like the one on the previous screen.
Rick sped through the next dozen screens, long rows of equations more complex than any Connie had encountered in her college math class, half of each line composed of symbols she thought were Greek but wasn’t sure. When he came to what appeared to be a list of questions, Rick stopped. Connie could read the first line: 12,000 year orbit coincides with construction of Gobekli Tepe: built in advance of, or in response to, seeding?
Oh God, Connie thought. She said, “You want to come to bed?”
“I will. You go ahead.”
“I don’t want you sitting up half the night feeling guilty.”
He paused, then said, “It isn’t guilt.”
“Oh? What is it?”
He shook his head. “I had a dream.”
Her mouth went dry. “Oh?”
He nodded. “I was sitting here with my Dad. We were both wearing tuxedoes, and the table had been set for some kind of elaborate meal: white linen tablecloth, candelabra, china plates, the works. It was early in the morning—at least, I think it was, because the windows were pouring light into the room. The plates, the cutlery, the glasses—everything was shining, it was so bright. For a long time, it felt like, we sat there—here—and then I noticed Dad was holding his fork and knife and was using them to cut something on his plate. It was this,” he nodded at the cooler, “this thing. He was having a rough time. He couldn’t grip the cutlery right; it was as if he’d forgotten how to hold them. His knife kept slipping, scraping on the plate. The thing was tough; he really had to saw at it. It was making this noise, this high-pitched sound that was kind of like a violin. It was bleeding, or leaking, black, syrupy stuff that was all over the plate, the knife, splattering the tablecloth, Dad’s shirt. Finally, he got a piece of the thing loose and raised it to his mouth. Only, his lips were still trembling, you know, doing that silent mumble, and he couldn’t maneuver the fork past them. The piece flopped on the table. He frowned, speared it with his fork again, and made another try. No luck. The third time, the piece hit the edge of the table and bounced off. That was it. He dropped the cutlery, grabbed the thing on his plate with both hands, and brought it up. His face was so eager. He licked his lips and took a huge bite. He had to clamp down hard, pull the rest away. There was a ripping noise. The thing’s blood was all over his lips, his teeth, his tongue; his mouth looked like a black hole.”
Connie waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she said, “And?”
“That was it. I woke up and came down here. There was nothing on TV, so I thought I’d get out Dad’s laptop and… It’s like a connection to him, to how he used to be, you know? I mean, I know he was already pretty bad when he was working on this stuff, but at least he was there.”
“Huh.” Connie considered relating her own dream, decided instead to ask, “What do you think your dream means?”
“I don’t know. I dream about my Dad a lot, but this…”
“Do you—”
“What if it’s from another planet?”
“What?”
“Maybe the dream’s a message.”
“I don’t—”
“That would explain why there’s no record of it, anywhere, why none of the museums knows anything about it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Connie said. “If this thing were some kind of alien, you’d expect it’d be all over the news.”
“Maybe it’s dangerous—or they aren’t sure if it’s dangerous.”
“So they pack it into a cooler?”
“They’re trying to fly under the radar.”
“I don’t know—that’s so low, it’s underground.”
“Or… what if a couple of guys found it—somewhere, they were out hunting or fishing or something—and they decided to take it with them in the cooler they’d brought for their beers?”
“Then why the red cross on the cooler? What about the sticker?”
“Coincidence—they just happened to take that cooler.”
“I could—look, even if that is the case, if a couple of hunters came upon this thing, I don’t know, fresh from its meteorite, and emptied out their oddly decorated cooler so they could be famous as the first guys to encounter E.T., how does that help us know what to do?”
“Who what? would send out the Men in Black?”
“I’m serious!” Rick almost shouted. “This is serious! Jesus! We could be—we have—why can’t you take this seriously?” He turned to glare at her as he spoke.
“Rick—”
“Don’t ‘Rick’ me.”
Connie inhaled. “Honey—it’s late. We’re tired. Let’s not do this, okay? Not now. I’m sorry if I’m not taking this seriously. It’s been a long day. Whatever it is, the thing in the cooler’ll keep until we get some sleep. If you want, we can call NASA first thing in the morning. Really—I swear.”
“I—” She readied herself for the next phase of his outburst, then, “You’re right,” Rick said. “You’re right. It has been a long day, hasn’t it?”
“Very. I can’t believe you aren’t exhausted.”
“I am—believe me, I’m dead on my feet. It’s just, this thing—”
“I understand—honest, I do. Why don’t you come up to bed? Maybe once you lie down—”
“All right. You go up. I just need a minute more.”
“For what?” she wanted to ask but didn’t, opting instead to drape her arms over his shoulders and press her cheek against his neck. “Love you,” she said into his skin.
“Love you, too.”
Her heart, settled after its earlier gallop, broke into a trot again as she padded down the hall to the stairs. The sight of Rick, once more staring at the computer screen, did nothing to calm it, nor did her lowering herself onto the bed, drawing the covers up. If anything, the thoroughbred under her ribs charged faster. She gazed at the bedroom ceiling, feeling the mattress resound with her pulse. Was she having a panic attack? Don’t think about it, she told herself. Concentrate on something else.
Rick. What else was there besides him at the table, his fingers resting on the keyboard’s sides, sifting through his father’s last, bizarre project? Not the most reassuring behavior; although it was true: each monthly pilgrimage to his father left him unsettled for the rest of that day, sometimes the next. No matter how many times she told him that his Dad was in the best place, that the home provided him a quality of care they couldn’t have (not to mention, his father’s insurance covered it in full), and no matter how many times Rick answered, “You’re right; you’re absolutely right,” she knew that he didn’t accept her reasoning, her reassurance. In the past, thinking that anger might help him to articulate his obvious guilt, she had tried to pick a fight with him, stir him to argument, but he had headed the opposite direction, descended into himself for the remainder of the weekend. She had suggested they visit his Dad more often, offered to rearrange her work schedule so that they could go up twice a month, even three times. What good was being store manager, she’d said, if you couldn’t use it to your advantage? Albany wasn’t that far, and there were supposed to be good restaurants there; they could make a day of it, spend time with his father and have some time for themselves, too.
No, no, Rick had said. It wasn’t fair for her to have to rework the schedule (arriving at which she’d compared to the circus act where the clown spins the plates on the ends of all the poles he’s holding while balancing his unicycle on the highwire). It wasn’t as if his Dad would know the difference, anyway.
He might not, Connie had said, but you will.
It was no good, though; Rick’s mind had been made up before their conversation had started. He had never admitted it, but Connie was sure he was still traumatized by his father’s last months of—you couldn’t call it lucidity, exactly, since what he would call to yell at Rick about was pretty insane. Gary Wilson had been an astronomer, his most recent work an intensive study of the dwarf planets discovered beyond Neptune in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Eris, Sedna, and Orcus were the names she remembered. From what she understood, his research on the surface conditions on these bodies was cutting-edge stuff; he had been involved in the planning for a probe to explore some of them. Plenty of times, she and Rick had arrived at his apartment to take him to dinner, only to find him seated at his desk, staring at his computer monitor, at a painting of one or the other of the dwarf planets. At those moments, he had seemed a million miles away, further, as far as one of the spheres he studied. Hindsight’s clarity made it obvious he was experiencing the early effects of Alzheimer’s, but the spells had always broken the moment Rick shook him and said, “Dad, it’s us,” and it had been easier to accept her father-in-law’s assurance that he had merely been daydreaming.
Not until his behavior became more erratic did it dawn on them that Rick’s father might not be well. His attention had been focused on one dwarf planet, Sedna, for months. Connie had sat beside him at the Plaza diner as he flipped over his mat and drew an asterisk in the center of it which he surrounded with a swirl of concentric circles, all of which he placed at one end of a great oval. “This is Sedna’s orbit,” he had said, jabbing his pen at the oval. “Twelve thousand years, give or take a few hundred. Over the next couple of centuries, it will be as close to us as it’s been during the whole of recorded history. The last time it was this near, well…”
“What?” Rick had said.
“You’ll see,” his father had declared.
They hadn’t, though, not directly. One of Rick’s father’s friends at the state university had phoned after a presentation during which the extent of Gary Wilson’s breakdown had become manifest. Connie had heard the lecture, herself, in person, on the phone, and in a long, rambling voicemail. She considered herself reasonably well-educated in a hold-your-own-at-Trivial-Pursuit kind of way, but Rick’s father’s discussion strained her comprehension. Almost thirteen thousand years ago, a comet had burst over the Great Lakes—yes, that was a controversial claim, but how else to explain the high levels of iridium, the nano-diamonds? The glaciers were already in retreat, you see; it was the right time, if you could measure time in centuries—millennia. This was when the Clovis disappeared—wiped out, or assimilated in some way, it was hard to say. You wouldn’t think a stone point much of a threat, but you’d be surprised. The drawings at Lascaux—well, never mind them. It’s what happens at Gobekli Tepe that’s important. Those curves on the stones—has anyone thought of mapping them onto Sedna’s orbit? The results—as for the shape of the monuments, those giant T’s, why, they’re perches, for the messengers.
And so on. The thing was, while Rick’s father was propounding this lunatic hodgepodge of invention, he sounded as reasonable, as kindly, as he ever had. Perhaps that was because she hadn’t challenged him in the way that Rick did, told him that his ideas were crazy, he was flushing his career down the toilet. Confronted by his son’s strenuous disbelief, Gary flushed with anger, was overtaken by storms of rage more intense than any she had witnessed in the seven years she had known him. He would stalk from their house and demand that Connie drive him home, then, once home, he would call and harangue Rick for another hour, sometimes two, until Rick reached his boiling point and hung up on him.
The end, when it came, had come quickly: she had been amazed at the speed with which Rick’s father had been convinced to accept early retirement and a place in an assisted living facility. There had been a brief period of days, not even a full week, during which he had returned to something like his old self. He had signed all the papers necessary to effect his departure from the college and his relocation to Morrison Hills. He had spoken to Rick and Connie calmly, with barely a mention of Sedna’s impending return. Two days after he settled into his new, undersized room, Gary had suffered a catastrophic event somewhere in his brain that the doctors refused to call a stroke, saying the MRI results were all wrong for that. (Frankly, they seemed mystified by what had happened to him during the night.) Whatever its name, the occurrence had left him a few steps up from catatonic, intermittently responsive and usually in ways that made no sense. There was talk of further study, of sub-specialists being brought in, possible trips to hospitals in other states, but nothing, as yet, had come to pass. Connie doubted any of it would. There were more than enough residents of the facility who could and did vocalize their complaints, and less than enough staff to spare on a man whose tongue was so much dead weight.
Harrowing as Rick’s father’s decline had been, she supposed she should be grateful that it had not stretched out longer than it had. From talking with staff at Morrison, she knew that it could take years for a parent’s worsened condition to convince them/their family that something had to be done. At the same time, though, Rick had been ambivalent about his father entering assisted living. There was enough room in the house for him: he could have stayed in the downstairs bedroom and had his own bathroom. But neither of them was available for—or, to be honest, up for—the task of caring for him. Rick’s consent to his father’s move had been conditional; he had insisted and Connie had agreed that they would re-evaluate the situation in six months. Their contract had been rendered null and void by Gary’s collapse, which had left him in need of a level of care far beyond that for which either of them was equipped. However irrational the sentiment might be, Connie knew that Rick took his father’s crash as a rebuke from the universe for having agreed to send him away in the first place.
Connie didn’t realize she had crossed over into sleep again until she noticed that the bedroom’s ceiling and walls had vanished, replaced by a night sky brimming with stars. Her bed was sitting on a vast plane, dimly lit by the stars’ collective radiance. Its dark red expanse was stippled and ridged, riven by channels; she had the impression of dense mud. That and cold: although she could not feel it on her skin, she sensed that wherever this was was so cold it should have frozen her in place, her blood crystallized, her organs chunks of ice.
To her left, a figure was progressing slowly across the plane. It was difficult to be sure, but it looked like a man, dressed in black. Every few steps, he would pause and study the ground in front of him, occasionally crouching and poking it with one hand. Connie watched him for what might have been a long time. Her bed, she noticed, was strewn with orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. At last, she drew back the blanket, lowered herself onto the red mud, and set out toward him.
She had expected the mud to be ice-brittle, but while it was firm under her feet, it was also the slightest bit spongy. She wasn’t sure how this could be. A glance over her shoulder showed the bed and its cargo of flowers unmoved. While she was still far away from him, she saw that the man ahead of her was wearing a tuxedo, and that he was Rick’s father. She was not surprised by either of these facts.
In contrast to her previous dream of him, Gary Wilson stood tall, alert. He was following a series of depressions in the plane’s surface, each a concave dip of about a foot, maybe six feet from the one behind it. At the bottom of the depressions, something dark shone through the red mud. When he bent to prod one, he licked his finger clean afterwards. Connie could feel his awareness of her long before she drew near, but he waited until she was standing beside him to say, “Well?”
“Where is this?”
“Oh, come now,” he said, disappointment bending his voice. “You know the answer to that already.”
She did. “Sedna.”
He nodded. “The nursery.”
“For those?” She pointed at the depression before him.
“Of course.”
“What are they?”
“Embryos.” The surface of his cheek shifted.
“I don’t understand.”
“Over here.” He turned to his left and crossed to another row of depressions. Beside the closest was a small red and white container—a cooler, its top slid open. To either side, the depressions were attended by thermoses, lunchboxes, larger coolers, even a small refrigerator. Rick’s father knelt at a dip and reached his hand down into the mud, working his fingers in a circle around whatever lay half-buried in it. Once it was freed, he raised it, using his free hand to brush the worst of the mud from it. “This,” he said, holding out to Connie a copy of the thing she and Rick had found on the Thruway. Its surface was darker than the spaces between the stars overhead.
“That’s an embryo?” she said.
“Closest word.” Bending to the open cooler, he gently deposited the thing inside it. His hands free, he clicked the cooler’s lid shut. “Someone will be by for this, shortly,” he said, raising his fingers to his tongue.
“I don’t—” Connie started, and there was an explosion of wings, or what might have been wings, a fury of black flapping. She put up her hands to defend herself, and the wings were gone, the cooler with them. “What…?”
“You have to prepare the ground, first,” Rick’s father said, “fertilize it, you could say. A little more time would have been nice, but Tunguska was long enough ago. To tell the truth, if we’d had to proceed earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered.” He stepped to the next hole and its attendant thermos and repeated his excavation. As he was jiggling the thing into the thermos, Connie said, “But—why?”
“Oh, that’s…” Rick’s father gestured at the thermos’s side, where the strange cross with the slender join and rounded arms was stenciled. “You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
Gary Wilson shrugged. His face slid with the movement, up, then down, the flesh riding on the bone. The hairs on Connie’s neck, her arms, stood rigid. She did not want to accompany him as he turned left again and headed for a deep slice in the mud, but she could not think what else to do. Behind her, there was a chaos of flapping, and silence.
The fissure in the mud ran in both directions as far as she could see. It was probably narrow enough for her to jump across. She was less sure of its depth, rendered uncertain by dimness. At or near the bottom, something rose, not high enough for her to distinguish it, but sufficiently near for her to register a great mass. “Too cold out here,” Rick’s father said. “Makes them sluggish. Inhibits their”—he waved his hands—“development. Confines it.”
There were more of whatever-it-was down there. Some quality of their movement made Connie grateful she couldn’t see any more of them.
“Funny,” Rick’s father said. “They need this place for infancy, your place for maturity. Never known another breed with such extreme requirements.”
“What are they?”
“I guess you would call them… gods? Is that right? Orchidaceae deus? They bloom.”
“What?”
“Bloom.”
THERE WAS A SMALL DECK AT THE BACK OF THE HOUSE, little more than a half-dozen planks of unfinished wood raised on as many thick posts, bordered by an unsteady railing, at the top of a flight of uneven stairs. A door led from the deck into the house’s laundry room, whose location on the second floor had impressed Connie as one of the reasons to rent the place two years ago, when her promotion to manager had allowed sufficient money to leave their basement apartment and its buffet of molds behind. On mornings when she didn’t have to open the store, and Rick hadn’t worked too late the night before, they would carry their mugs of coffee out here. She liked to stand straight, her mug cradled in her hands, while Rick preferred to take his chances leaning on the rail. Sometimes they spoke, but mostly they were quiet, listening to the birds performing their various morning songs, watching the squirrels chase one another across the high branches of the trees whose roots knitted together the small rise behind the house.
A freak early frost had whited the deck and stairs. Once the sun was streaming through the trunks of the oaks and maples stationed on the rise, the frost would steam off, but at the moment dawn was a red hint amidst the dark trees. Red sky at morning, Connie thought.
She was seated at the top of the deck stairs, wrapped in the green and white knitted blanket she’d grabbed when she’d left the laundry room hours ago. The bottle of Stolichnaya cradled in her arms was almost empty, despite which, she felt as sober as she ever had. More than sober—her senses were operating past peak capacity. The grooves in the bark of the oaks on the rise were deep gullies flanked by vertical ridges. The air eddying over her skin was dense with moisture. The odor of the soil in which the trees clutched their roots was the brittle-paper smell of dead leaves crumbling mixed with the damp thickness of dirt. It was as if she were under a brilliant white light, one that allowed her no refuge, but that also permitted her to view her surroundings with unprecedented clarity.
She had emerged from her dream of Rick’s father to silence, to a stillness so profound the sound of her breathing thundered in her ears. Rick’s side of the bed was still cold. Except for a second strange dream on the same night, there had been no reason for Connie to do anything other than return to sleep. Her dream, however, had seemed sufficient cause for her to rouse herself and (once more) set out downstairs in search of Rick. In the quiet that had draped the house, the creaks of the stairs under her feet had been horror-movie loud.
She had not been sure what she would find downstairs, and had walked past the front parlor before her brain had caught up to what it had noticed from the corner of her eye and sent her several steps back. The small room they called the front parlor, whose bay window overlooked the front porch, had been dark. Not just nighttime dark (which, with the streetlight outside, wasn’t really that dark), but complete and utter blackness. This hadn’t been the lack of light so much as the overwhelming presence of its opposite, a dense inkiness that had filled the room like water in a tank. Connie had reached out her hand to touch it, only to stop with her fingers a hair’s-breadth away from it, when the prospect of touching it had struck her as a less than good idea. Lowering her hand, she had retreated along the hall to the dining room.
Before the dining room, though, she had paused at the basement door, open wide and allowing a thick, briny stench up from its depths. The smell of seaweed and assorted sea-life baking on the beach, the odor had been oddly familiar, despite her inability to place it. She had reached around the doorway for the light switch, flipped it on, and poked her head through the doorway. Around the foot of the stairs, she had seen something she could not immediately identify. There had been no way she was venturing all the way into the basement; already, the night had taken too strange a turn for her to want to put herself into so ominous, if clichéd, a location. But she had been curious enough to descend the first couple of stairs and crouch to look through the railings.
When she had, Connie had seen a profusion of flowers, orchids, their petals eggplant and rose. They had covered the concrete floor so completely she could not see it. A few feet closer to them, the tidal smell was stronger, almost a taste. The orchids were motionless, yet she had had the impression that she had caught them on the verge of movement. She had wanted to think, I’m dreaming; this is part of that last dream, but the reek of salt and rot had been too real. She had stood and backed upstairs.
Mercifully, the dining room had been unchanged, its table, chairs, and china cabinet highlighted by the streetlight’s orange glow. Unchanged, that is, except for the absence of the cooler from the table, and why had she been so certain that, wherever the container was, its lid was open, its contents gone? Rick’s father’s laptop had remained where her husband had set it up, its screen dark. Connie had pressed the power button, and the rectangle had brightened with the image of one of the T-shaped stone monuments, its transverse section carved with what appeared to be three birds processing down from upper left to lower right, their path taking them over the prone form of what might have been a man—though if it was, the head was missing. The upright block was carved with a boar, its tusks disproportionately large.
Thinking Rick might have decided to sleep in the guest room, she had crossed to the doorway to the long room along the back of the house, the large space for which they had yet to arrive at a use. To the right, the room had wavered, as if she had been looking at it through running water. One moment, it had bulged toward her; the next, it had telescoped away. In the midst of that uncertainty, she had seen… she couldn’t say what. It was as if that part of the house had been a screen against which something enormous had been pushing and pulling, its form visible only through the distortions it caused in the screen. The sight had hurt her eyes, her brain, to behold; she had been not so much frightened as sickened, nauseated. No doubt, she should have fled the house, taken the car keys from the hook at the front door and driven as far from here as the gas in the tank would take her.
Rick, though: she couldn’t leave him here with all this. Dropping her gaze to her feet, she had stepped into the back room, flattening herself against the wall to her left. A glance had showed nothing between her and the door to the guest room, and she had slid along the wall to it as quickly as her legs would carry her. A heavy lump of dread, for Rick, alone down here as whatever this was had happened, had weighed deep below her stomach. At the threshold to the guest room, she had tried to speak, found her voice caught in her throat. She had coughed, said, “Rick? Honey?” the words striking the silence in the air like a mallet clanging off a gong; she had flinched at their loudness.
Connie had not been expecting Rick to step out of the guest room as if he had been waiting there for her. With a shriek, she had leapt back. He had raised his hands, no doubt to reassure her, but even in the dim light she could see they were discolored, streaked with what looked like tar, as was his mouth, his jaw. He had stepped toward her, and Connie had retreated another step. “Honey,” he had said, but the endearment had sounded wrong, warped, as if his tongue had forgotten how to shape his words.
“Rick,” she had said, “what—what happened?”
His lips had peeled back, but whatever he had wanted to say, it would not come out.
“The house—you’re—”
“It’s… okay. He showed me… Dad.”
“Your father? What did he show you?”
Rick had not lowered his hands; he gestured with them to his mouth.
“Oh, Christ. You—you didn’t.”
Yes, he did, Rick had nodded.
“Are you insane? Do you have any idea what—? You don’t know what that thing was! You probably poisoned yourself…”
“Fine,” Rick had said. “I’m… fine. Better. More.”
“What?”
“Dad showed me.”
Whatever the cooler’s contents, she had been afraid the effects of consuming it were already in full swing, the damage already done. Yet despite the compromise in his speech, Rick’s eyes had burned with intelligence. Sweeping his hands around him, he had said, “All… the same. Part of—” He had uttered a guttural sound she could not decipher, but that had hurt her ears to hear.
“Rick,” she had said, “we have to leave—we have to get you to a doctor. Come on.” She had started toward the doorway to the dining room, wondering whether Wiltwyck would be equipped for whatever toxin he had ingested. The other stuff, the darkness, the orchids, the corner, could wait until Rick had been seen by a doctor.
“No.” The force of his refusal had halted Connie where she was. “See.”
“What—” She had turned to him and seen… she could not say what. Hours later, her nerves calmed if not soothed by the vodka that had washed down her throat, she could not make sense of the sight that had greeted her. When she tried to replay it, she saw Rick, then saw his face, his chest, burst open, pushed aside by the orchids thrusting their eggplant and rose petals out of him. The orchids, Rick, wavered, as if she were looking at them through a waterfall, and then erupted into a cloud of darkness that coalesced into Rick’s outline. Connie had the sense that that was only an approximation of what she actually had witnessed, and not an especially accurate one, at that. As well say she had seen all four things simultaneously, like a photograph overexposed multiple times, or that she had seen the cross from the top of the cooler, hanging in the air.
She had responded with a headlong flight that had carried her upstairs to the laundry room. Of course, it had been a stupid destination, one she was not sure why she had chosen, except perhaps that the side and front doors had lain too close to one of the zones of weirdness that had overtaken the house. The bottle of Stolichnaya had been waiting next to the door to the deck, no doubt a refugee from their most recent party. She could not think of a reason not to open it and gulp a fiery mouthful of its contents; although she couldn’t think of much of anything. She had been, call it aware of the quiet, the silence pervading the house, which had settled against her skin and become intolerable, until she had grabbed a blanket from the cupboard and let herself out onto the deck. There, she had wrapped herself in the blanket and seated herself at the top of the deck stairs.
Tempting to say she had been in shock, but shock wasn’t close: shock was a small town she had left in the rearview mirror a thousand miles ago. This was the big city, metropolis of a sensation like awe or ecstasy, a wrenching of the self that rendered such questions as how she was going to help Rick, how they were going to escape from this, immaterial. From where she was sitting, she could look down on their Subaru, parked maybe fifteen feet from the foot of the stairs. There was an emergency key under an overturned flowerpot in the garage. These facts were neighborhoods separated by hundreds of blocks, connected by a route too byzantine for her understanding to take in. She had stayed where she was as the constellations wheeled above her, the sky lightened from blue-bordering-on-black to dark blue. Her breath plumed from her lips; she pulled the blanket tighter and nursed the vodka as, through a process too subtle for her to observe, frost spread over the deck, the stairs.
When the eastern sky was a blue so pale it was almost white, she had noticed a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. For a moment, she had mistaken it for Rick, had half stood at the prospect, and then she had recognized Rick’s father. He’d been dressed in the same tuxedo he’d worn in her second dream of him, the knees of his trousers and the cuffs of his shirt and jacket crusted with red mud. His presence prompted her to speech. “You,” she had said, resuming her seat. “Are you Rick’s Dad, or what?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Can you tell me what’s happened to my husband?”
“He’s taken the seed into himself.”
“The thing from the cooler.”
“He blooms.”
“I don’t—” She’d shaken her head. “Why… why? Why him? Why this?”
Rick’s father had shrugged, and she had done her best not to notice if his face had shifted with the movement.
She had sighed. “What now?”
“He will want a consort.”
“He what?”
“His consort.”
She would not have judged herself capable of the laughter that had burst from her. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“The process is underway.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This?” She had held up the vodka. “It’s alcohol.”
“Yes. He thought that might help.”
“What do you—” Something, some glint of streetlight refracting on the bottle’s glass, had caused her to bring it to her eyes, tilting it so that the liquor sloshed up one side. In the orange light shimmering in it, Connie had seen tiny black flakes floating, dozens, hundreds of them. “Oh, no. No way. No.”
“It will take longer this way, but he thought you would need the time.”
“‘He’? You mean Rick? Rick did this?”
“To bring you to him, to what he is.”
“Bring me—”
“To bloom.”
“This is—No. No.” She had wanted to hurl the bottle at Rick’s father, but had been unable to release her grip on it. “Not Rick. No.”
He had not argued the point; instead, before the last denial had left her mouth, the space where he’d stood had been empty.
That had been… not that long ago, she thought. Time enough for the horizon to flush, for her to feel herself departing the city of awe to which the night’s sights had brought her for somewhere else, a great grey ocean swelling with storm. She had squinted at the bottle of Stolichnaya, at the black dots drifting in what remained of its contents. Rick had done this? So she could be his consort? Given what she’d witnessed this night, it seemed silly to declare one detail of it more outrageous than the rest, but this… She could understand, well, imagine how an appearance by his father might have convinced her husband that eating the thing in the cooler was a good idea. But to leap from that to thinking that he needed to bring Connie along for the ride—that was something else.
The thing was, it was entirely typical of the way Rick acted, had acted, the length of their relationship. He plunged into decisions like a bungee-jumper abandoning the trestle of a bridge, confident that the cord to which he’d tethered himself, i.e. her, would pull him back from the jagged rocks below. He dropped out of grad school even though it meant he would lose the deferment for the sixty thousand dollars in student loans he had no job to help him repay. He registered for expensive training courses for professions in which he lost interest halfway through the class. He overdrew their joint account for take-out dinners when there was a refrigerator’s worth of food waiting at home. And now, the same tendencies that had led to them having so much difficulty securing a mortgage—that had left the fucking cell phone’s battery depleted—had caused him to… she wasn’t even sure she knew the word for it.
The sky between the trees on the rise was filling with color, pale rose deepening to rich crimson, the trunks and branches against it an extravagant calligraphy she could not read. The light ruddied her skin, shone redly on the bottle, glowed hellishly on the frosted steps, deck. She stared through the trees at it, let it saturate her vision.
The photons cascaded against her leaves, stirring them to life.
(What?)
She convoluted, moving at right angles to herself, the sunlight fracturing.
(Oh)
Blackness.
(God.)
She lurched to her feet.
Roots tingled, blackness, unfolding, frost underfoot. Connie gripped the liquor bottle by the neck and swung it against the porch railing. Smashing it took three tries. The last of the vodka splashed onto the deck planks. She pictured hundreds of tiny black—what had Rick’s father called them?—embryos shrieking, realized she was seeing them, hearing them.
Blackness her stalk inturning glass on skin. Connie inspected the bottle’s jagged top. As improvised weapons went, she supposed it wasn’t bad, but she had the feeling she was bringing a rock to a nuclear war.
The dawn air was full of the sound of flapping, of leathery wings snapping. She could almost see the things that were swirling around the house, could feel the spaces they were twisting. She released the blanket, let it slide to the deck. She crossed to the door to the laundry room, still unlocked. Had she thought it wouldn’t be? Connie adjusted her grip on her glass knife, opened the door, and stepped into the house.