by Cody Goodfellow
Life was not so unkind to Howell as it seemed to the world at large—it offered few surprises, and predictable rewards. Where there were explicit directions, Howell found he could go anywhere, do anything, but whenever and wherever he got lost, he found Atwater.
The first time it happened, he believed, at first, that it was as real as everything else in his life up to that point had been. On his way to a business appointment in Burbank: he’d given himself plenty of time to get there, leaving the office in Mid-Wilshire an hour ahead of the departure time on the Triple A itinerary he’d printed out the night before. After living in LA for over a year, he still did this for any place he had never driven, and kept a binder and three map books.
Traffic shut him down within sight of his office. Parked on the 101, swimming in sweat, and he suddenly, absolutely, needed to pee. He couldn’t just give up and get off; it had to get better soon, but it got worse, so clusterfucked by Hollywood Boulevard that he couldn’t even get through the glacial drift of traffic to the exit. Watching as the time of his appointment came and went, and he wasn’t even in the Valley, yet he was committed. The southbound traffic was almost as bad. Howell left a message to reschedule with the client in Burbank. The secretary treated him like some idiot who’d tried to ride a horse into town.
Wondering which of the empty coffee cups at his feet he’d like to try peeing in, wondering why the sensible Volvo people had never tackled this crying need of the long-haul motorist, Howell crawled through the pass and into the Valley.
The 101 burst out into Griffith Park, and a blazing Catherine Wheel avalanche of sulfurous afternoon sunlight speared his brain. Cascades of shaggy green hills and shadowed black canyons lurched up to the shoulder, the wilderness under glass of the park and Howell was looking when horns sounded behind him, and the road ahead was a vacant plain.
Howell whooped with joy and stomped on the gas. The Triple A directions had wilted into pasty slime from the heat and smog and sweat from his hands, pages stuck together. The damned thing was supposed to be foolproof, distances totaled out to the hundredth of a mile, but 42.62 crept by on his trip odometer, and no Burbank Avenue. No offramp at all, and then he saw from the baffling menu of interstate and city highway junctions in the southbound lanes, that he was on the wrong freeway, and headed east to Pasadena.
No one let him out of the left lane until he’d passed under the Golden State Freeway. With a berserker roar, he kamikazed the next off-ramp and slammed on the brakes, power-sliding up a hairpin chute between blank brick walls. He skidded to a stop just short of the sign. ATWATER, it said—no population or elevation, no explanation, no Kiwanis or Lion’s Club chapters. Just ATWATER.
He idled at the intersection for a good long time. No other cars came. There were no other cars. Anywhere. In the middle of LA. No cars. No pedestrians, either, and Howell waited for something, for a director to scream, “Cut!” and a crew to spill out from behind these painted murals of a ghost town to resurrect the scene he’d ruined.
On the three corners opposite the off-ramp, a 7-11, an AM/PM, and another 7-11, all abandoned, windows shattered, roofs askew and foundations cracked. All angles subtly off, and apartment buildings down the street had collapsed, crushing their ground floors or spilling their contents out into the street. All the entrances were swathed in CAUTION tape, and Condemned notices were pasted on all remaining doors. “By order of FEMA—”
The last real earthquake in Los Angeles was in 1993. Howell looked into this before taking the job and moving here. A decade later, and they never tried to rebuild? Unless it was a movie set . . . or something else happened here—
Imagination did nothing good for Howell. He let it go and set the Volvo rolling down the main drag.
Atwater wasn’t large; he could see the same brick wall cutting across the street only a few blocks from the offramp. The whole area was walled off from the rest of the city, a pitcher plant with only one mouth, into which he’d stumbled. The sounds of the city outside were almost completely muzzled—he heard only the hushed hum of distant traffic and something like electronic wind chimes, or a Don’t Walk alarm for blind pedestrians, but here, nothing moved. Fine then, he’d turn around.
A man threw himself across the hood of his car. Threw himself, those were the right words, because Howell certainly didn’t hit him—
“Please,” the man bleated, beating on the windshield, “please help—”
The man came around to the passenger side, and Howell hadn’t locked it. He wore a navy blue suit and tie, shabby and shiny, the kind of thing an exceptionally cheap prison might parole its least promising inmates in, but he didn’t look like a bum, and Howell supposed he wanted to help, so he let the man fumble it open and fall into the passenger seat. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting,” the man said, “for someone to come—”
“Where the hell are we? Where’s everybody?”
“No onramp,” the man wheezed, hauling the door shut and turning to look at Howell. “We have to go back up the off-ramp, but nobody comes in here, ever . . . For God’s sake, let’s go!”
Something buzzed past Howell’s ear. He whipped his head around so fast something tore in the back of his neck, but he let out a sharp yelp and shouted, “Did you see it? You let a—let it in—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.
Howell looked at the man’s face, at gaping pores all over his face and neck, tessellated hexagons like tiny waxen mouths. Black, buzzing bullets oozed out of them. His head was a honeycomb.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” the man offered, his humming hand shooting out to bar Howell in his seat. “Please just drive.”
Howell shrieked. He was allergic to beestings. He was allergic to the word “bees.” He yanked open the door and threw himself out, except the fucking seatbelt trapped him, hanging upside down in the street. His hand slapped at the button, or was it a latch. Bees swarmed and formed a beard on the man’s face.
“You’re making them mad,” the man said, his eyes wet, nose streaming snot and furious bees drowning in it. Tiny feather-touches of agitated air played over Howell’s face, the microscopic violence of thousands of wings. A homicidal halo roared around his head.
The seatbelt snapped free and Howell rolled out of the Volvo, hit the street running on all fours, out of the intersection and into the nearest shelter, the underground garage of a three-story townhouse.
He slid on his belly down the steep driveway and crawled under the gate, jammed open on a toppled Vespa scooter. The dark was his only cover, here. He had no real hope of finding help, only of hiding until the lunatic either stole his car or abandoned it, but he was not getting back in there. He’d walk out onto the freeway and hail a Highway Patrolman, he’d get out, he’d go home and never come back—
Almost nauseous now with relief, Howell unzipped and pissed in the dark.
A sound, and then another, behind him. His bladder slammed shut; his balls crawled up and wrapped around his femoral artery, legs tingled and fell into a coma. Small sounds, but distinctive, and if not threatening, then in this place they portended a myriad of things, all awful.
It was the sound of a metal tool striking a metal tray, and the sound of a miniature saw biting into something hard, and the reek of burning bone. Howell turned and sought something to hide behind as he saw how far from alone he was.
A moth-battered ceiling fixture lit up a shining steel table in the center of the empty garage. Two gaunt figures in black smocks and leather aprons hovered over it. They wore cages over their heads like old-time insane asylum alienists, or their heads were cages, for they seemed to imprison nothing but shadows.
Between them on the table lay a nude female body, painfully white, viciously thin, a naked sprawl of cruel angles and lunar planes, decoratively inked with dotted lines that encompassed the whole form. Freshly sutured cuts ran down the arms and legs, and perhaps the worst of it was that Howell saw nowhere a drop of blood.
Deftly, one of the alienists sawed down the bridge of the dead woman’s nose, while the other peeled the parted skin away from the skull. Howell didn’t know how long he watched; their procedures were so methodical, he got sucked into infinite minutiae, only to take a sudden, stabbing breath when suddenly, with a magician’s flare, the peeler laid bare the skull and held it up.
The skull was black glass, toxic onyx ice, squealing and smoking as it met the hot, close air. The alienist dropped it into an oil drum, changed into a fresh pair of heavy rubber gloves and opened the gilded doors of a medieval reliquary on a sideboard.
The other alienist continued his master ventral incision at the jaw, laying open the fuligin rib cage, which spewed ribbons of oily vapor across the table.
Working behind, the first alienist selected a skull of ancient yellow bone from the reliquary and deftly slipped it into the hollow face, arranging the features just so, then nipping the lips of the incision together with black thread as fast as a sweatshop matron.
Cowering behind a Camaro half-propped up on cinderblocks in the mouth of the garage, Howell started to creep backwards to the gate. He’d face down the honeycombed man, or just run out onto the freeway, he’d get out of here—
When the woman on the table spoke.
“I felt that,” she whimpered, and Howell was gored by the wonder in her voice, as much as by the fact that the speaker was a filleted cadaver, with two headless surgeons elbow-deep in her. He trembled, but it was thousands of misfired reflexes warring with each other as he tried to frame a reaction to this—
An alienist set a new rib cage in place and stitched it up as the other prepared to join his incision with the cleft of her groin.
Howell rushed at the cutter, screaming, “Get off her!” with his fists pounding its broad back and his mad rush tipped him so that he almost fell into it when the towering form collapsed on itself with no more resistance than an airborne shopping bag. He blundered into the edge of the table and knocked the wind out of his lungs as the alienist with the needle calmly reached for something on the tray that looked like a nail gun.
On the table, the woman looked at him. Her eyes, impossibly vast black pupils, ringed by violet irises like bone-deep bruises, drank him in and stole something he needed to breathe. “Take me,” she said, “take me away—”
Howell’s hand found the knife and lashed out across the table at the other alienist. The blade slashed the unresisting fabric, the black form deflated and melted into the oil-stained shadows.
Howell dropped the knife and looked for something to cover her with, trying to say, “I’ll get you—get you—out—”
“What’s your name, here?” she asked.
He took off his jacket and draped it over her, arms out, awkwardly trying to size her up to lift. “Um, Howell, Roger, um, Howell. Listen, are you okay to move? I saw . . .”
She sat up on the table and leaned into him. The exquisitely fine stitching down the center of her face creaked when she smiled and put the knife to his throat. Her other hand hustled his crotch. “I’m cured.”
He looked away, but she forced him to look with her knife. “Get hard,” she commanded, and tore herself open.
Her breasts, imperceptible but for her nipples, like bites from some enormous spider that lived in her bed, already swelling, seeking him out, accusing snail-eyes.
His stomach rolled and everything was hot, rushing water, drowning him. He wished he could melt and flow away through her fingers, but where he wanted it least, he swiftly became solid under the harsh ministrations of her bony hand.
Using the knife and his cock as levers, she got him up onto the table, peeled away his slacks and boxers. “Let me see you,” she husked in his ear, “show me what you really are.”
He couldn’t melt or run away, so he just took it. Froze solid as she lowered herself onto him, cold, tight and dry, spat on the head of it and impaled herself.
Inside, she felt like anything but flesh, ground-glass needles and gnashing teeth and mortuary marble, doors within doors opening in a cold black cathedral. He thought of the operation he’d interrupted, the looted fossils of a saint swapped out for her necrotic skeleton, and in the reliquary he saw a pale yellow pelvis, untransplanted—
Spastic reflex wrapped his arms around her, protruding ribs like notches for his fingers. Her torso shook as if she was full of panicked birds, and she hissed, to him or to herself, “Take your medicine.”
Shuddering, she rose up and dropped herself hard against him, and spider webs of black ice shot through his hips and into his guts. In his head, he reviewed sums, columns of expenditure figures for the projected relocation scheme his company had sent him up here to investigate. Culling them fiercely in the quiet corners of his mind, he noted two adding errors and committed them to memory, as soon as he got back to his laptop, he’d correct them—
The knife never left his throat. It sawed back and forth as she smashed herself against him, eyes rolled back, breath choppy gusts of frigid mist that grew colder with every stroke, despite the unbearable friction.
“Take it, take it,” she growled in his ear, and in the cold and heat he felt he’d lost what he’d put into her, it was hers now, and she was fucking him to death with it. He could only hold on.
Her rhythm sped, stiffened, such a ferocious blur of motion that he regretted daring to open his eyes, and she screamed, “He’s coming, faster, he’s coming—”
The sensation spreading through him now pulled him further away from the world, fired his gut-sense that the agony of pleasure he felt was really her, taking him over. He hid from it, crying inside, please God, just let it be over—
And then it was, and his skin was slathered in cold motor oil, and she was gone. He did not look around or try to cover himself, huddled on the icy steel table in a puddle of oil and urine, shocked mute by the sudden stillness.
The ground shook.
Dust and grit sprinkled his cold, raw skin. He rolled off the table and hitched his piss-soaked pants up. He was alone in the dark. It was so quiet, he could hear the Volvo, still idling out on the street, and those faint, phantom chimes. But something else was coming, an itch in the soles of his feet, a tremor that shivered through his bowels, and he remembered what she’d said, just before she vanished.
He’s coming—
A steady, subsonic rumble spread up through the floor, a silent sound of pure terrestrial protest. A whole patch of ceiling gave way, dumping plaster and shattered concrete and spark-spitting washing machines into the garage.
Howell crawled under the gate and scrambled up the driveway on all fours, uttering a weird, panicked hooting sound with each hard-fought breath. He could still hear his car, so close, he could hear the seat belt alert beeping endlessly, and the dull burble of the public radio talk show he’d tuned in on the stereo, but he could also hear voices on the street, and those chimes, growing louder, reverberating off the encircling walls of Atwater. And buzzing—
Howell hit the sidewalk and had to remind himself to get up and run to the Volvo. He saw no one around it, but the honeycomb man stood in the middle of the street, and he wasn’t alone.
Another man, short, with a head like a claw hammer, and snarls of piano wire running from his arms and legs and torso to a jumbled mound of marionettes in the street behind him, like the sole survivor of some sort of street mime’s massacre. A little girl stood beside them, sucking her thumb and holding a length of an impossibly long albino python, which wrapped around her so many times, showing neither head nor tail, that she might have been made out of snakes.
She pointed at Howell as he ran for his car. The honeycomb man shouted, “Wait! Take us with you!”
He said something else, but though Howell saw his mouth working, he could hear nothing but the sound of jets, a squadron of them, flying up out of the secret, hollow heart of the earth.
Behind Howell, the townhouse lurched forward and settled down into the underground garage. The apartment block behind it bulged and broke open, rooms bursting like bubbles full of abandoned human lives and flaming debris flying, and smoke and something coming through it, something that made the freaks on the street race for his car. Howell got in and slammed the door, locked it and threw the car in gear.
He screamed and threw the wheel to the right, jumping the curb and flattening a street sign. The honeycomb man spilled across the hood in a roiling cloud of bees. Howell stomped on the gas, batting the air vents shut.
The puppeteer waved at him, hurling screaming marionettes into the grill of the car. Their wooden claws gouged out his headlights and chrome and ripped off his antenna as he passed, looking, looking for the narrow niche in the wall that he’d come in through, but it was gone, the intersection with the three convenience stores was now a T-junction facing a blank brick wall.
The insanity, the injustice of it all, finally broke him. He kept going forward, but he saw nothing.
And then the ground shifted, and the car was going uphill, but he only went faster, and the wall fell away as the ground rose, as something unspeakably heavy gained on him, making a sinkhole of Atwater from which he could not hope to escape.
Howell saw the freeway. The cars were hurtling by and he was headed into their midst in the wrong direction, but he did not care. He saw only fire and black smoke in his rearview mirror, and he wrenched the wheel around as the Volvo sailed off the ragged edge of the road and over the wall, and he saw a flash of white in the mirror. He looked and saw her face, a snowflake in the collapsing furnace, and then he was over the wall, and the car’s axle nearly snapped as the car hit the onramp with the wheels at a right angle, but it sailed down the dry ice-plant embankment and swerved, amid a chorus of horns, into the flow of traffic.
Howell got off at the next exit and cleaned himself up. Then he went to his appointment in Burbank.
It was some weeks before Howell could admit to himself that he wasn’t going to report the incident. To tell it would make it real, declare that he believed in it, but no one would believe him. How much easier to just go on, to leave it behind, when it fit nothing else in his life but his dreams, which he never remembered, anyway. For over a year, a bad dream was all it was, and all it would ever be.
Until he got lost again.
Driving up to Sacramento, an interview for a senior accounting position with the state comptroller’s office, and he would have flown, if not for the terror of handing over his life to some unseen mumbler with a bar tab in eight states. If he had been meticulous in his planning before, he was now obsessive. He bought maps and plotted his route and itinerary, and he researched Atwater, and made damned sure that nothing brought him any closer to it as he passed the junction he’d stumbled into last time.
He’d been stunned to discover it was a real place, an odd, isolated knothole in the haphazard sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, encircled by freeways and largely undeveloped since the early seventies, but an unremarkable, ordinary place that had suffered only a few broken windows in the last earthquake. What might have driven a more curious man mad only salved the fear he hadn’t dared confront since it happened, because it confirmed that it was all a bad dream. He drove through the Valley, and passed Atwater unmolested.
He had the route folded in his lap and the GPS unit in his new Volvo told him he was in the San Joaquin Valley on the northbound 5, entering Chowchilla, but the GPS unit had no way of knowing about the truck wreck, bodies strewn across both lanes and up the scrub-brush shoulders, naked children everywhere, and all he could do was clutch the map to his breast and tell himself, you’re not lost, not lost, don’t look—
But they were only pigs, scattered by the impact with a truck loaded with tanks of flammable gas that came off the Chowchilla on-ramp too fast. Only a pair of highway patrol cars had arrived, the troopers hanging their heads at the waste of good bacon.
Detour signs and sawhorses with rusty orange blinking lights diverted the traffic up through Chowchilla onto the two-lane eastbound 140. Howell followed the signs through the tiny town and turned north on the 99 at the promise of eventually reaching Sacramento thereby. Remarkably, almost no other cars joined him on the detour, preferring to sit in gridlock while the dead pigs were mopped up, and he should have sneered at their stupidity, but instead, he couldn’t stop wondering what they knew—
He was on the 99, he was sure of it, when it started to rain. Suddenly, he was driving through a car wash, and the GPS unit in the dash, in fact everything in the dash, blinked and went black.
He hit the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work. He braked soberly to a stop, angling to the right shoulder and hitting his hazard lights, though no sign that they worked, either. He was about to call OnStar and have them send a tow truck, and he had his map out on his lap, when he saw two men step into the tiny arena of his headlights, arm in arm and grappling, legs crazily digging for traction in the slick mud.
Howell had his phone in his hand when the two men smashed their heads together and staggered back into the dark. He was pushing the number he had programmed to speed-dial the friendly OnStar operator somewhere in Bombay or New Delhi, who would use satellite imagery and impeccable, pleasingly accented English to guide him out of the storm and back to the highway, even though he was definitely not lost—
His eyes roved over the map, up the 5 to the 140 to the 99, and up the 99 past Merced, and a tiny town just off the highway, though no roads to or from it showed on the map. The town was called ATWATER.
He looked out the window. Each fighter had his hands around the other’s throat, and throttled his foe for all he was worth. Faces purple and streaming in the rain, they had wrung each other half to death when one suddenly kicked the other in the gut. The injured man folded, and his attacker pressed the advantage with ruthless abandon, smashing his head again and again into the pavement.
Howell sat there watching, even after the dashboard lights came back on, and the windshield wipers gave him a clearer view.
The victor lifted the vanquished up by his head, looking deeply, longingly, into the eyes of the man he’d beaten. Then his arms tensed and he squeezed the skull, crushing it as his mouth opened wider, jaw unhinged, skin stretched, to engulf the top of the broken head between his lips. Howell’s hands fumbled for the gearshift, switched on the high beams. Oblivious to the light, the victor opened his mouth still wider, hoisting his twitching enemy off his feet and forcing the body, inch by inch, into his own.
Howell reversed and floored it, headed back the way he’d come. But the road was different. Corn crowded in on both sides. He saw peaked Victorian rooftops behind the waving stalks, but knew he’d find no help there. His brain crawled out of his skull and flew above the racing Volvo. If he hadn’t been so meticulous in his bathroom stops this trip, he would have voided his bladder as he screamed through the town of Atwater.
Not a single board of a building looked familiar, but he knew it was the same town.
He passed an intersection that wasn’t there before, a big black sign swinging above an old wire-hung traffic light said, PENTACOST ROAD.
He passed a man dressed in his mother’s skin, that still screamed and nagged in his ear; another who sweated fabulous tumors of molten gold, and fungal, crystalline growths like diamonds; an armless, legless nude woman in an eyeless rubber mask and ball-gag stuffed in her mouth, raced along side the car, borne aloft by black segmented tentacles growing from her gaping, snapping vagina.
The crumbling Victorian mansions crept closer to the road until they strangled it. In its death-throes, the road thrashed from left to right until a mansion blocked the road entirely, and Howell aimed for the narrow alley between the colossal house and its neighbor, but the car wedged itself into the space and refused to budge in either direction. Howell climbed over the seats and out the back.
The storm battered the land with an ever-growing din, but still he heard the somnolent music of those molten chimes, coming from everywhere and nowhere—and growing louder. He looked frantically all around, waving a flashlight in the rain-slashed dark, but still he ran full into the honeycombed man before he saw him.
Howell fell on the pavement, but rolled and aimed the flashlight at the man. His problem with the bees had gotten worse. They were bigger, the size of hummingbirds circling his head, dancing secrets to each other on his shoulders, the hexagonal combs like shotgun holes in his face and neck and down beneath his shirt.
“Hurry,” the honeycombed man said, and the bees echoed, “she’s waiting for you.”
Howell backed away from the man, from his car, from his own body. There had to be a way out of this, a way to escape, to wake up—
He turned and took a long stride to run away, but there was the man who’d beaten—and eaten—his doppelganger. “Get me out of here,” the man said, and fingers squirmed out of his mouth, clawed at his lips. The fighter bent over, wracked by spasms and surges of movement under his muddy white suit. He screamed, and Howell saw something thrashing in the seat of his pants, tearing away the fabric, a tail—no, a leg . . .
Howell backed away again, but he heard angry bees circling behind him. The man threw himself at Howell’s feet, screaming so loud, so wide, Howell could see the man inside him screaming, too.
“Come on,” the honeycombed man took his arm and dragged him to the porch of the mansion in the road. Cobalt blue lanterns saturated the darkness in the parlor, vertebral shadows of legions of ferns, and among them, a bed, and on it, a woman’s body—
But no, it wasn’t her, and had he hoped it would be? This one was enormous, a monstrous puffball belly with drained, flaccid limbs trailing away from it like the knotted fingers of surgical gloves. Sizzling wings at his back drove him closer.
“Mr. Howell,” she said, and he started, because underneath all that, it was her. “I know all about you, Howell. I even know your real name. What do you know?”
“I—” he looked around, at anything but her, and he heard creaking, crackling sounds, the ferns growing up through the floor so fast they glowed, feeding on the fever-heat, the light, pouring out of her. “I don’t know anything.”
“You got away, but you keep getting lost, you keep coming back.”
“I got away because I don’t belong here. This is all some kind of—”
“A mistake?” Her breath hitched in her, like laughter, or something inside trying to escape. “You escaped because you have no imagination. You don’t dream.”
“I had a dream . . . about you, before. You—This . . . this is a dream—”
“This is a dream—” The ground rumbled. The walls shook off pictures and knickknacks. A window looking out on the street shattered, the wind and rain pried away the storm shutters. Her belly shifted and stirred. “But it’s more real than where you think you came from.”
Her hand shot out and caught his. He pulled away so hard he staggered into the wall, his shoulder went right through the moldy plaster. “You . . . did something to me. Why did you do that?”
Her face brightened. “You remember! I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea, but there was no time. There’s no time, now, either.” Her hand caressed the turgid globe of her belly.
“I don’t understand what’s going on, here, but what are you?” He swallowed and choked as he realized he was most afraid that she was not real. “All of you? What happened to you?”
“You did.” She convulsed, pain drawing her into a ball around her pulsating womb.
He pointed and stammered, “No, that’s not mine.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.” She shrieked and made ribbons of the sheets. Her heels dug into the mattress, kicking divots of flea-infested stuffing across the rumbling room.
Howell knew he should take her hand but was terrified of coming any closer. Her belly contorted as if it caged a wild animal, then two animals battling, then each of them began to transform to catch the other at a disadvantage. Her skin stretched out into wild formations, stalks like roots and the eyes of overripe potatoes looking for anchorage or food to fuel its runaway metamorphosis—looking for him.
Howell backed into and right through the wall. He tripped over crumbling plaster and spilled into the atrium, narrowly dodging the heavy front door swinging in the whipping wind. The rain was no longer rain. Hot ash and bits of still-flaming debris swept by his face.
The hordes of Atwater, a hundred or more of them, crowded into the cul-de-sac before the mansion. On the horizon, a blood-red sun rose and swiftly grew, for it was not rising into the sky, but rolling up the road. The horde met this sight with bestial screams and wails of despair, but they remained rooted, distracting themselves with desperate last-minute orgies, battles and suicide attempts. Though they seemed incapable of coming, killing, or dying, still they chased these forbidden states in the burning rain even as the red sun drew closer.
The chimes grew louder, a steamroller trampling a forest of tubular bells. Inside, the woman called out to him, but he was fixed to the spot.
As the sun swelled, it came clear to Howell. A towering, brazen idol, taller than the highest weathervane on any of the mansions it shouldered aside as it rolled down the street on iron-shod wheels.
A giant, saturnine head and torso, with great hands outstretched to lift its worshippers to its grinding mechanical jaws. The whole idol glowed dull red with the heat of the furnace raging inside it. All that it touched crumpled in white flames, but the hordes of freaks crowded closer, herded by cage-headed alienists with baling hooks and pikes.
The horde tortured itself, each tearing at the deformities of his or her neighbor as the heat between them came alive with light and fire. Packed closer and closer together as the idol trapped them in the cul-de-sac, they approached an ecstasy of panic, yet they meekly stepped or knelt, singly and in knots of writhing bodies, onto the spreading palms of the glowing idol.
Howell knew this was the thing from which he had averted his eyes, the last time he got lost in Atwater. When she said, “He’s coming,” she meant this. Now, it was too late to escape, the horde danced on his trapped car. He could go through the mansion, dive out a window on the other side and run all the way home, if he had to, but he got no further than the parlor, where the woman’s ordeal was, for better or worse, nearly over.
The woman who raped him told him the thing inside her was his. He could come no closer than the hole he’d made in the wall, but he could not run away from it. Her legs jerked and wrenched impossibly akimbo, laying bare her privates, and a glimpse of something fighting its way out of her.
No one had ever asked for what she took from him. No one had ever wanted anything from him but his facility as a calculator, and so the violence with which she had taken his seed had left him curiously stronger than he’d been, before. He’d never realized how much he feared human contact, and he saw in her slitted eyes, now, how much like him she was, how loathsome the act had been for her, but how desperately necessary.
That the act had produced some offspring, here in this place that was insanity itself, was the only sane thing Howell could find to cling to.
He went to her and took her hand. He tried to soothe her with words and touch, but she seemed beyond noticing. “If you’re going to be the mother of my child,” he said, “I think you could at least tell me your name.”
Her eyes rolled but focused on him, and in the midst of her panting seizure, she found breath to laugh at him for real. “Your child? Oh, Howell, you idiot—”
A rush of scalding heat raised blisters on his face, and the outer wall melted away like a tortilla under a blowtorch. Outside, all he could see was a single red eye, glowering cruel and absolute with the fires of a collapsing sun behind it, a brain that blasted all it touched to atoms. It looked full on them, now, as, all at once, the woman gave birth.
Her hand clasped his and the mountain of her belly tore open like a water-balloon smashing into a wall.
Ferns curled and turned to silver tornadoes of ash. Swamps of sweat vaporized out of the sheets. The woman’s hand went slack and deflated in his grip, split open like rotten fruit. Howell’s own clothes smoldered and gave off puffs of steam and smoke, but he noticed none of it.
The thing that squatted in the ruined chrysalis of the woman at first looked like nothing more than her insides, bones, muscles, guts and all, stirred and resculpted into a crude effigy of a newborn child, but it redefined itself as he watched. Swaddled in blood and shreds of uterine lining, the thing uncoiled and opened its eyes. Swollen sacs of tissue burst and unfurled into membranous wings, and Howell understood.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice piping and unsteady in its new vessel, “for helping me escape. I’m sorry you won’t.”
The wings snapped and beat the air, shaking off slime and lifting the newborn body into the air in one swift motion. Howell ducked, then made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but she eluded him and dove out the window, into the eye of the idol.
And then the whole house was flying sideways, and Howell had no choice but to go with it. The chiming, roaring explosion went on forever, the room rolling end over end and dancing wheels of fire all around him. And when it all stopped, he was too broken to move, but somehow, he was outside.
The brazen idol clawed at the sky, at a fleeting dart of light that was well away from its glowing grip, and the idol seemed to come unhinged inside, and all its parts simply disconnected from the others and the furnace, unleashed, spilled out waves of fire upon the hordes. Howell ran and ran and still the sound of the fire rolling, gaining, eating up the land, grew in his ears, but he kept running, in his mind calculating his speed and caloric consumption and estimated time of arrival if he just ran and ran home, if he ran to Mexico, if he just ran around the world and came back to this exact point—
Somewhere, long before he got home, he dropped in his tracks and fainted, mind and body completely spent.
And he woke up in a ditch beside the 99 just outside the town of Chowchilla, a sheriff’s deputy in an orange poncho poking him in the ribs with a flashlight. “Thought you was one of them pigs,” said the deputy.
He held his life together pretty well, after that, all told, and most of the time, he didn’t remember his dreams.
He worked from home, toting up accounts for several small, borderline illegal companies. He did not, could not, go outside. The fear that he would get lost again, that he might lose track of the route down the street to the corner store, kept him inside. In every corner of every place he did not know as intimately as well as his own body, a doorway to Atwater waited.
And yet he kept working, eating and sleeping, because, though he did not admit it even to himself while he was awake, he hoped for something.
He lurched on through life like this for months before the dreams started to push through into work, into the blank spaces on the screen and the black pauses between commercials on TV. Her face, her wings lifting her out of the fire and into the sky. He still lived, he began to see, only because he thought she would come back.
That there might be some sign, some message to affirm that she was not just a dream, he began to seek out, but nothing came forth to save him. He looked for other Atwaters and found one, in Minnesota—“a small, friendly community which welcomes people with open arms . . .” said the website of the town “named for Dr. E. D. Atwater, of the land department of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad”—but nothing to distinguish it or marry it to the others, except its name. He did searches, found people, companies, named Atwater, but nothing that resonated . . . until he found a listing in his old local phone book, and did a search on the computer.
Atwater Transpersonal Institute. The website gave a breezy outline of treatments, but Howell didn’t read them. He looked only at the picture on the home page, of a row of couches with people lying on them, sleeping peacefully with spider webs of electrodes pasted to their skulls. He studied the woman on the nearest couch, the planed bones of her face, the black wings of hair flared out on the pastel pillow, and he got his car keys.
At the end of a quiet residential street, on the peak of a hill overlooking Presidio Park with its Spanish colonial fortress, the Atwater Institute looked like the first outpost of yet another colonization. A low, faux-adobe building huddled around a conical tower of tile and glass. It hid itself from the street behind white brick walls and eucalyptus trees, but the gates readily swung open when Howell pressed the button at the unmanned security checkpoint. He drove up the cobblestone path to the front doors, where a nurse waited. He wanted to turn around and go back home, but he forced himself to get out and walk up to her. “I think—I know a woman who is being treated here. I’d like to see her, please.”
The nurse only stared, backed away and went inside, leaving the door hanging open. He followed, pausing helplessly as a valet slipped into his car and whisked it off to an underground garage.
Inside, the atrium was dimly lit by a soothing cobalt light. Banks of ferns in hanging pots softened the outlines of the room, and a soft, almost inaudible music played somewhere, an atonal carillon stirred by alien wind.
Howell wanted out, needed in. She’s here, somewhere, it’s all here, it wasn’t in your mind, oh God, it was all real—
“I’ll get Dr. Atwater,” the nurse said, and fled the room. Howell looked at abstract pictures on the walls, at a watercolor of a man with a beehive for a head, at another of a man being strangled by marionettes with their own wires, which sprouted out of his flesh.
“Art therapy,” said a voice over his shoulder. “It’s not pleasant to look at, but it makes them healthier.”
“What else do they do?” Howell turned and looked at the Doctor’s feet. He could not look at his face, but he heard the man’s reaction.
“I—my God, what’re you doing here?” asked Dr. Atwater.
“You treat people with sleep therapy here, right?”
“That’s correct. Maybe you—”
“I have been having bad dreams for a number of years, Doctor. About this place.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe if I could show you . . .” Dr. Atwater beckoned him through a door into an even darker corridor. Howell followed, looking around him. The music was louder back here. Atwater said, “Binaural tones guide the treatment. Shamanic cultures know it and use them in rituals, in drumming and trance-inducing states to guide the shaman into the realm of the spirit. It’s subtler than medication, and it doesn’t blunt the subconscious input from the limbic system. It lets dreams become the patient’s reality.”
“For how long?”
“In my papers, I recommended three-day regimens over several months, but the modalities promised so much more for extreme cases, if we could only push deeper, longer. But you know all this.”
Howell stopped avoiding the doctor’s eyes. “Where is the woman? The one in the picture?”
Atwater opened a door, waved Howell closer. A body lay on the couch that filled the cell. Howell leapt at it, but froze.
The honeycombed man twitched and shivered on the couch. He wore mittens and restraints, but still his face was red and chafed, all facial hair plucked out from compulsive grooming.
“One of our most challenging cases. He suffers from a massive OCD complex, but in his therapy, he externalizes his disorder, manifesting it in terms he can metaphorically abolish. He’s been dreaming for a month on, a week off for two years, and he’s getting better.”
Blinking, seeing the bees like ravens on the patient’s face, Howell muttered, “No, he’s not.” Then, rounding on the Doctor, he demanded, “Where is she?”
He looked deep into Dr. Atwater’s eyes, then, and though they were a cold blue, he saw the lambent red glow in them. His mouth made a bold pretense of smiling openness, but his brow was forked with wrathful wrinkles, and his rusty red beard formed a half-mask of flames. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who are you looking for?”
“You know, don’t you lie!” Howell flinched at his own voice, but he took hold of the Doctor’s arms and pushed him back against the wall. “You were there! You tried to eat her up like all the others, but she got away from you!”
Atwater’s eyes flashed, his jaw dropped. “So, you found a back door into the group . . . Well, that’s a mystery solved, at any rate.”
As if done with Howell, he made to turn away and go about his business, but Howell slammed him again into the wall. “Where is she?”
“Gone. Transferred to a private institution. Her parents might not sue. They’re very wealthy, powerful people, and they were very upset when their neurotic, drug-addicted daughter came to us to be cured and emerged a full-blown schizophrenic.”
“Your dream therapy fucked up her brain?”
“No, Howell, you did. She got it from you.” Atwater opened another door onto darkness. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Howell stepped inside. A body lay on the couch, but there were many machines, a congregation of automated mourners beeping and wailing their grief and providing the only light, trees with IV dripping solutions and the atonal music of binaural chimes.
Atwater spoke into his ear in a low whisper. “He was our first extreme case. Persistent vegetative state from birth, ward of the state, we secured power of attorney before the first bricks of the Institute were laid. He was going to be my greatest triumph.”
Howell approached the couch, feeling like he did in the mansion, as if he were about to ignite and combust from the heat of the idol, from the heat pouring out of the body on the couch.
“At first, he responded swimmingly, but the deeper we tried to drive into his subconscious, the more he retreated . . . until one day, about three years ago, he just stopped waking up. I concluded that the psychic disintegration—for that’s what it looked like, to me—was a result of his distorted self-concept, his lack of imagination. But I underestimated just how powerful his imagination really was, didn’t I?”
Howell tried to remember where he went to school, who his parents were, anything more than three years old, and wondered why none of it had ever mattered before. Because he was a hermetically sealed, self-contained world unto himself, and nothing outside him had ever been anything but numbers, until she forced him to touch her, and escaped—
“At the time, we never reckoned on the possibility that our patients were manifesting in a shared environment, let alone that one could escape it. When Ms. Heaton began to exhibit your symptoms, we thought it was a ploy. Ms. Heaton was very cunning, manipulative, and had attempted suicide more times than her family bothered to keep track of. We never dreamed she could contact the other patients, let alone that she might find you. But you found her.”
Howell leaned closer to the sleeper, eyes roving over the only truly familiar face he’d ever known. The geography of it, seen from any angle for the first time, totally engrossed him, so that he didn’t notice when Atwater locked the door and took out a syringe.
“His name is Jeremy Ogilvie, but we use code names for our patients, to protect their privacy. The nurses coined his—he used to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was touched, so they called him the Howler.”
Atwater’s shadow loomed across the white desert of sheet, but Howell only leaned closer to the sleeping face.
“For so long, I’ve thought of you, Mr. Howell, as my only failure. It would appear that you are the only one I ever really cured.”
Howell reached up and touched the mouth of the sleeping face, and smiled when its eyes opened.
Cody Goodfellow has written nine solo novels and three with New York Times bestselling author John Skipp. Two of his short fiction collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action, received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote and co-produced the short films Stay At Home Dad and Clowntown: An Honest Mis-Stake. He has also appeared in the background on numerous TV programs, as well as videos by Anthrax and Beck. He lives in Portland, Oregon.