Читать книгу The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ® - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 5

BOY BLUE, by Steve Rasnic Tem

Alice worked the cigarette vigorously with quick, nervous puffs. The floors and walls seemed to whimper.

“You know, it’s okay if you’re not sure you love me anymore.”

She stirred, focused her enormous blue eyes on him, scowled. “Don’t you have any respect for yourself?”

He looked past her. “Maybe…I don’t know anymore. I do know…I’d do anything for you.”

“Oh, Morgan, you make me feel guilty all the time!”

His heart wasn’t in the argument, but he reacted because he knew she wanted him to defend himself. He pulled out something from one of the many pop psychology books he had read; it was the only way he knew to program himself to argue. “I can’t make you feel guilty.”

He knew immediately he had made a mistake.

“That’s right, Morgan; you can’t make me feel.”

He could just stare at her now, the nimbus of yellow hair crowning the puffy, sleep-starved face, and listen for the noises. The noises were more persistent when they argued: the scrapings, tappings, wood creakings so like whimpers. He was getting another migraine.

She examined him slowly. “I’m sorry I said that. We did it again, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. We get weird every time we go to a party. Pretty nasty business tonight.”

The noises were getting louder. Alice looked around the walls, and stared at the cellar door. “I want you to go down there.”

“You know…it’s probably just a field mouse, or a gopher.”

He looked at the door. He had been avoiding it. He needed to know what was going on—if it was a mouse, perhaps a trapped cat, some small animal living in the crawl spaces. But he hadn’t checked it out.

“Morgan…please.”

His headache was getting worse. But he’d do anything for her.

Morgan stood silently on the first landing, wiping the sweat up off his forehead and into the thick black hair. Then he started down the long flight of steps. Like many other old handmade houses in this mountainous part of Virginia, this one had been built into the side of a hill. No ground had been leveled, and the floors were left staggered up and down the hill. The living room was six inches above the bedroom, the kitchen a good two feet below that. Alice insisted it was dangerous.

As he descended the steps, Morgan grabbed a flashlight off a slanting shelf attached to the railing, and played the light over the chaotic substructure of the house, where joints and floor braces came into each other at strange angles. Large crawlways and shelves were left between the separated walls. Down below he could see the mouth of a long tunnel off the cellar which led to a small coal outcropping mined out of the hill. The air was moist and cloying.

The noises seemed to have stopped. But Morgan could hear water dripping.

A large crevice behind the staircase was full of trash and fallen mud. Morgan’s great-uncle and the two families who had lived there after him had dumped their garbage there for an old underground stream, now diminished to a trickle, to dispose of. For most mountain dwellers the area streams had been their dishwasher, garbage collector, and sewer line. Someone had tried to bury the trash by hauling in dirt, but that had only made individual bits of trash stand out like jewels.

A sighing seemed to move through the house.

An old lace-up boot, four rusted cans, a piece of rotting tire, driftwood, a chair leg. Someone’s baby doll, minus one arm, an eye, and half the hair pulled out. Rising and falling water had left topographical map lines on the torso. He moved the doll, thought he heard a faint cry, went so far as to search for a voice box, but the head cavity was full of dirt, nothing more.

He’d had a doll as a child. “Little Boy Blue” it said on the tag. He’d begged his mother for months to buy it for him. His father had wanted to give him a gun for squirrel hunting, but he didn’t want to kill squirrels. He’d pestered her so much she’d finally given in.

“Now, Morgan, don’t get your clothes all dirty, now. And let little Louise play with Blue too!” His mother smiled at the neighbor lady across the fence. “Oh, he’s all right.”

Morgan overheard her and began whispering to Blue, away from little Louise. Louise began to cry.

When his father came home from the fields each night Morgan was talking to Blue on the faded purple living room rug. “Is that true, Blue? Do you really come from there? How do you know so much, Blue?”

His father towered over him, the face from the eyes down a darker color than the rest. His father walked to the back of the house and a door slammed.

“Will you take me there, Blue, will you?”

The wide black belt surprised him.

“I’ll beat the queer out of you, boy!”

Blue slipped from Morgan’s fingers as he frantically tried to protect his legs, shoulders, and head from the blows.

Morgan didn’t cry, not once. Even when Blue’s head was cracked. Blue just stared at him. Blue didn’t cry either. Morgan didn’t belong here.

Blue had been sent to take him back where he belonged.

A key chain protruded from a section of yellow clay near the stair railing. Two old Indian-head pennies. A ball of wire. Half a yellow dinner plate. Armour’s Baking Soda can. A round ring of amber flush with the dirt surface. He took a stick and dug around the ring, exposing one, then two, then a whole cache of amber beer bottles, the labels rotted off.

Drinking, fighting, and making babies had been about the only things to do in those hills. When his father drank, it upset his aim. More than once a belt aimed at Morgan’s rear or legs bruised a cheek bone or scarred an eye instead. Once in his frustration his father had thrown down the belt, picked up a brick and struck Morgan in the back of the neck.

The next morning Blue seemed to have a small crack in the back of his neck. Morgan knew Blue was angry inside, but the doll just closed his eyes.

But that night Morgan heard whispering from underneath his bed. Blue was gone from his pillow. When he crouched and stuck his head under the bed he could see Blue lying on the floor, mouth open, staring at him.

* * * *

He’d reached the bottom of the staircase, his head beginning to ache again. He could barely see anything around him, or the tunnel mouth a few feet away. Listening carefully, he could hear a scurrying as of tiny feet back toward the coal outcropping. The floorboards were creaking above him. Alice was pacing. Something scratched behind him. He whirled, but there was nothing.

He started down the tunnel to the coal outcropping, wishing he had another flashlight. There were more scratching noises ahead of him.

Someone had stacked large wooden crates and crumbling cardboard boxes along both sides of the tunnel. He recognized some of the objects as old family possessions; this cellar had long been a Gibson family storage center. The wood and cardboard were oily and blackened, almost the color of coal. The moldy, humid smell was overpowering here, a scent he had enjoyed as a child but which now seemed oppressive, as if his throat were rapidly filling with cool, moist earth.

He coughed, suddenly feeling dizzy, and grabbed the side of a box.

A loud squealing and a nest of squirming, hairless baby rats spilled out onto the tunnel floor. Morgan stepped back quickly, mashing one of the pink, shapeless forms into the mud.

Morgan ran, then stumbled several steps before reaching a bare part of the wall past the boxes. He slumped there, trying to catch his breath. Alice was pacing directly over his head, in one of the bedrooms now, as if she were following his progress.

He could hear more distant noises, noises like whimpers somewhere back near the coal outcropping.

He’d gone out west looking for Alice, or someone like her. She had been a fascination since the first day he’d met her. She said it herself, though not in the way he might have liked: “You always sound like I’m some rare, odd stone you’ve picked up.”

“You’re different from any woman I’ve ever known. I’m just fascinated.”

“But I need you to like me for what I want to be, not what you want me to be!”

Alice would make him forget. Make him forget all the bad times. Like the night at the fraternity house, the night that got him into the hospital. “Rum and sleeping pills don’t mix! Morgan killed himself with thirty-six!” There was a loud banging at the door, he remembered, but he’d been having a lot of trouble with voices, and after awhile he had learned to ignore them.

She would make him forget his father’s phonecall, the call that came only a week after Morgan had entered St. Anthony’s Mental Hospital. “We can’t afford to keep you in that fancy place no more, Morgan.” The old man wanted to trade cars again. “Now listen, Bob Wilkins down on Long Branch just got back from that State place, and he’s a whole lot better. An’ it don’t cost nothin.”

Massive, brain-numbing doses of Thorazine, Stellazine, Mellaril; they’d make him a whole lot better, sure pa. Plus maybe a little bit of Congentin so he wouldn’t feel inclined to swallow his tongue. Three aides had to drag him away from the phone, like a puppet or an enormous, cast-off doll.

Alice would make him forget. He had been sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to hear the voices.

* * * *

Morgan slid down the tunnel wall and leaned back on his heels, his fist knotted against his mouth. The noises like voices had grown louder down at the tunnel’s end. He wanted to scream, run back up the stairs and capture Alice in his arms again, hold her and make her comfort him. He couldn’t do this for her.

Perhaps he did need her more than she needed him, but he was determined to give her something in return. “I’m sorry, Alice. Sometimes I can’t help the things I feel. I hate to use the word, but I was an…abused child.”

“Yeah. Well, there’s more than one kind of abuse.”

He had hugged her then, and she buried her face in his neck.

Now she wouldn’t hold him anymore. He could still hear her pacing over the tunnel. He slapped the wall of cool earth, hurting his hand. He needed to hold her. If there had been a post nearby, he’d have filled his arms with that.

She would make him forget stopping aides in St. Anthony’s halls, telling them he had damaged the plastic on his head and badly needed fixing. She would make him forget the dream he had a few days after his father’s phonecall. He is in a ward with dozens of patients, blank-faced babies and drooling old men, women in dirty yellow pajamas. A picture postcard from his parents: “Wish you were here.” Pointed and curled red cliffs on the postcard, yellow and purple spherical plants…

The last two boxes in the tunnel were unsealed. He recognized some of them as childhood possessions. Books, old books mildewed and rotted, the covers pulled off, pages falling into flakes, cloth going back to thread. The fetid remains of his old clothing, his cousin Louise’s toys, some of his own. There was just the head of a doll.

Morgan touched the doll’s hair, then noticed it moving and stared in fascination as the small nest of black insects shifted position on the pink plastic skull.

Looking closer he could tell it wasn’t Blue.

…There’s a baby in the corner of the hospital room. Playing quietly, now humming. Eyes the size of silver dollars, bulges in the forehead like two knobs. Its head appears to be unnaturally large…

Something scurried above him. Morgan jerked up his head, just in time to catch sight of a rodent disappearing into a rift in the stone-and-earth ceiling. He could still hear Alice’s pacing, seemingly closer now, and he suddenly wasn’t sure he could remember what she looked like; anxiety pricked the back of his neck.

He could see the pockmarks in the walls, the small craterlike holes in the floor, the ragged surface of the terrain—as if he were on the moon. He shouldn’t have been able to see so well in this part of the tunnel.

A low whimpering, more like mewling, erupted from the dark end of the tunnel, continued on a space, then died.

Then the night after graduation, the night his father staggered home drunk and started kicking Morgan, screaming at him, accusing him of a number of perverted acts, and Morgan didn’t, couldn’t fight back couldn’t say a word, the doll acted.

When Morgan went back to his darkened room, he discovered a pale light beneath his bed covers. Lifting up the sheet he found two glowing pieces of glass—Blue’s eyes. Then wetness on his leg. He reached frantically for the light switch.

Blue was lying by his foot, covered with blood. The plastic head was almost severed at the neck, and the doll was greatly bloated and yellowish. The enormous empty sockets seemed accusing as they gazed up at Morgan. He swore he could hear it whisper, if he could only strain hard enough.

That night he wrapped the doll in newspapers, walked down to the creek behind the house, and threw it in. It took a long time for the creek to carry it out of sight.

…The nurse bounces a ball, smashing it into the baby’s face. The baby screams. Why doesn’t she realize what she’s doing? She bounces it harder and harder; the baby screams and screams, its mouth stretching in agony, and still she strikes it, beats it, smashes the ball into the baby’s face…

Then Morgan could see the trail through the tunnel, a shallow furrow as if from something being dragged, with two small balled prints on either side.

There was a slight whispering sound, then several sharp cries. Rats scurried in the boxes behind him. Alice quickened her pace overhead.

…The baby bleeds from the nose, the baby’s arms too long, the baby with no legs, the baby hobbling away on its hands, dragging its narrow torso, whimpering. Morgan wants to scream, but is afraid of being punished…

Alice had changed since they’d come to Virginia. She was irritable most of the time; they argued more. She blamed him for her depression, saying she’d only come out here to please him. She preferred the dry air of Colorado to all this horrible humidity and rot. She complained of suffocation. Then the whispers, the cries, the whimpers began to take over the house, the voices he thought he had left behind here years ago.

As soon as they got into town they had driven up to his mother’s place. He didn’t really want to see her, but he felt he had to go there first. His father had died three years ago from a broken vein in his head.

“Did I ever tell you what it was like, havin’ you, son?”

“Oh, I always supposed it was just the usual way.”

He smiled conspiratorially at Alice.

“Not that usual, no sir!” She gestured expansively. “I had a fourteen-hour labor and the doctor was drunk. Family friend, and he was drunk, and scared as anything! Broke my pelvis bad, gettin’ you out, you being big, sixteen pound they said. Blood and all that over the floor, me, him, and the nurse. And no knock-out drops in those days, nothin’ to help me. He almost dropped you, gettin’ sick he was. Nurse grabbed you, and whooee, he was outta there! Lord, the way I was screaming and bleeding! And you was hollerin’ to beat the band. Why you shoulda seen the way he wrenched your head comin’ out, bruised it something awful; nurse got quiet as a mouse when she saw that, but I could feel him bump me with ya. I knowed he done it. Coulda been a retard, they all said. Coulda had the brains of a baby doll!”

Morgan closed his eyes. His head was hurting again. When he looked up Alice was staring at him, her lips tightly pressed and trembling. His mother died two weeks later.

…The patients take off their clothes, dance, wrestle in the middle of the floor. Pus glistens on their skin. They laugh, they scream. They open their mouths so widely their lips crack and split. The nurse plays the honky-tonk piano, her arms and legs thrashing. Her skirt rises over her hairy thighs. Looking closer, Morgan sees that she has a moustache…

* * * *

The trail led far into the tunnel. Morgan knew that the tunnel couldn’t go this deep into the hillside. He should have passed the seam of coal long ago. But the tunnel continued, at a slight downward angle, yard after yard. The light was slightly brighter here, and he saw the bones of tiny animals strewn along the path. A flat frog skeleton, like the frog he had seen devoured by a waterbug near home. First its snout pierced the side of the frog, then the frog slowly deflated like a punctured balloon, the insides dissolving, being sucked through the snout, leaving skin and a few bones.

The tunnel narrowed. He had to crouch. Rounding a slight bend, he heard a rustling. But when he made the complete turn he saw nothing.

He could hear water dripping. A few spider webs patterned the wall. He had forgotten his fear of the dark. He couldn’t hear the whimpering.

He never would cry.

…The patients rip at each others’ open wounds, some tearing at bed sores with broken teeth. Morgan runs into the hall. Pale faces leer at him from open doorways. He runs as fast as he can, but seems to make no progress down the hall. A passing nurse grabs him by the neck, forces his mouth open, and throws a pill between his teeth. He chews it vigorously…

He never would cry.

The night after his eighth birthday party, when he hadn’t seen his father all day, he had awakened with Blue tucked under his arm to the sounds his father made fumbling around the foot of his bed, staggering and grabbing at the tall bed post. Morgan shut his eyes except for a slit.

The old man stared awhile, then went to the side of the bed. He looked at Blue, reached out his hand, then pulled it back and left the room.

A little later he was back again, a gun in his hand.

He crawled on top of the bed, straddling Morgan with his heavy legs. Morgan still pretended to be asleep.

His father pointed the gun at Morgan’s head. Then his father broke his silence, whimpered, cried out loud, and turned the gun around and began beating Morgan in the face with the handle.

It hurt. Morgan could feel things mashing, breaking, giving way in his face. But he refused to cry.

His father was screaming now, pulling the gun back so Morgan couldn’t see it, then slamming it down hard into Morgan’s nose, chin, the top of his head. The blows made dull wet sounds. Morgan could barely see, large red spots growing on his father’s shirt. He began to cry.

He wondered if his father was going to drive his nose through the top of his head, so that he would really look strange from then on. Different. He went to sleep for awhile.

He’d been lucky; they’d just had to rebuild his nose a bit. Morgan squinted into the darkness of the tunnel. How long had he had this headache? It seemed to have gotten worse.

…The nurse has given him the wrong medicine! He tries to call out to her. His voice is a whisper. He can’t breathe. Something is terribly wrong. Pressure in his head. He puts his hands to throbbing temples. His head is swelling; the skull is pushing his fingers out at an angle from his wrists. He tries to call her. She won’t listen. He follows her up one corridor and down the other, his head growing. The skin around his eyes stretches. His eyes stare. His mouth contorts to a silent scream. His nostrils stretch to slits. He can’t breathe. Hard to see. A horn like protuberance pushes its way out of his skull. He chases her around and around the nurses’ station. He wants to scream from the pressure but can’t. His head explodes.

* * * *

Something had touched his hand, something coming out of an adjoining chamber. Something whimpering.

Hydrocephaly is a condition caused by an increase in the volume of cerebrospinal fluid within the skull. It enlarges the head, the pressure forces the brain to the base of the skull, and the cranial bones begin to separate. Vision and hearing may be lost; paralysis may ensue. Morgan knew the symptoms well; he’d been fascinated by congenital defects since his college days, and especially by hydrocephaly. He’d visited the back wards in the state home and been disturbed by the vague sense of belonging he had felt.

Again it touched his hand. At first he wouldn’t turn, thinking that it would be too dark to see the thing anyway. But again the touch; it was persistent. Morgan turned slowly.

The creature had a globular head maybe thirty-five inches in circumference. Excess brain seemed to be riding the top of its atrophied shoulders in a membranous sack. Its eyes were like giant silver dollars. Veins were prominent in the scalp.

The child had no legs, just an elongated trunk it dragged around by means of too-short crutches. Its eyes stared up at Morgan; its tiny toothless mouth pursed inquisitively.

It wore a ragged blue bandana around its almost non-existent neck.

It burbled at him through distorted throat and nasal passages.

“Noooooo! I’m almost thirty years old; you can’t be here!” Morgan screamed, balling his fists at his sides. The baby remained calm, betraying no reaction. “She…she loves me! I don’t want you! You’ve…you’ve been waiting for me, looking for me all this time, haven’t you? Trying to hold me back, always wanting to pull me down. I don’t need this!”

Morgan sat down in front of the child and began to whine, moaning the words. “I can’t live with you. You won’t let me have anything. You hold me back; I have to take care of you. I can’t go on with my life because you won’t leave me alone!”

Still the baby just burbled and nodded, watching Morgan with those enormous white eyes.

Morgan suddenly realized he hadn’t heard Alice’s pacing for some time. He looked down at the hydrocephalic, up at the tunnel ceiling, and started his run.

“Alice!” He pushed his way through the narrowed tunnel.

He was tripping over boxes now, spilling and tossing their contents through the darkness. Clothing fell into powder and greenish sludge, toys and bottles and rotting household goods scattered, insects moved into the dark corners out of his path.

Had it been here all this time?

Morgan reached the bottom of the staircase. “Alice!”

Had it followed him all these years?

He took the stairs two at a time, stumbling, clutching the creaking rail. Gunstock, beer bottles, cans, boots, tire, driftwood, decaying underwear came rushing out of the past, whirling around him.

He stumbled over each landing and leapt to the adjoining step.

“Alice!”

Alice would make him forget.

Morgan tore open the cellar door and stepped out into the living room. “Alice?”

All the lights in the house were on.

He walked quickly from room to room, but Alice wasn’t in any of them.

Returning to the living room he noticed that the front door had been left open. He walked out to the edge of the porch. Looking past the gray bulk of the barn he could see a few lights from the town in the valley below. He breathed deeply, feeling small and childlike. He could imagine what she might have said. Even trade: one fantasy for another.

He could feel the tiny knotted fists clutching his pants legs at the back of his knees.

He could feel something, not quite bone and not quite flesh, pressing into the backs of his thighs, then the small hands reaching around his knees for an embrace.