[Note by the Author: When I was suffering from a terrible tooth infection that left me sleepless and sitting upright for four days, glued to the couch, chewing anti-inflammatory pills, and praying for death, I wondered about many things. One of them was brain cancer, of what it would be like to slowly melt away, driven to insanity by the constant pain. When I was sick I became delusional, like Heston Glick, my character in the story you're about to read. This grain of experience slipped into the clam-trap of my mind, where it was coated and jeweled for the next year. Yesterday, sitting at the coffee shop with my writer friends (coffee shop, LA, writers, you say?), Mike Robinson and I decided to start writing. I was pleased to discover that the pearl was ready to be plucked. I punched out the first 1000 words in 45 minutes, and finished the rest that evening. So here it is. Paranoia does not always spell insanity.]
“A
tumor?” Heston Glick nearly choked on the word.
The doctor didn’t turn, just continued to stare at the CT scan clipped onto the lightboard, where a wisping black stain obscured the white convolutions of Heston’s brain. It stretched from his hypothalamus to the bulk of his frontal lobe, dark spears with all the appearance of thorns.
Heston heard his wife’s stifled gasp from a great distance. The reaction sounded strange to him, triumphant when it should have been afraid, and he wondered about it only long enough to realize that he would die, and it didn’t really matter. He experienced the sudden freedom of mortality, surrendered to it, let it swallow him whole.
And then he felt the tumor move.
***
Heston drove home in silence, blocking out Janet’s wailing, her apologies and whisperings that everything would be okay. Heston imagined leaning over to slap her, grabbing hold of the cheeks that had fattened and paled through their fifteen years of marriage to remind her that he was the one with the tumor in his head.
But he did no such thing. Janet had trained him to lie to himself, to belay his urges and coddle her endless insecurities. She had, in effect, reduced him to a trembling puppy that’s only joy in the world came from licking its master’s hand.
Heston turned onto the freeway and headed north, watching the thunderheads push down from the mountains. He saw the distant ink-stain diffuse beneath the storm cell, knew that it was raining over the ridge, wanted suddenly to be standing there, naked, screaming at the clouds, screaming for lightning.
Lightning, he thought, overwhelmed by a white infinity. The effulgence superimposed itself over the road in a bleeding beam, becoming the lightboard in the doctor’s office, and then becoming something older, something buried in his consciousness, pressing upward with decomposing hands.
Lightning. What about lightning?
Heston felt as a child in the dark. He experienced a terror so total all knowledge of his person drained away. He heard its voice within him then, a theremin warbling of whalesong and locusts, a collective scream that came from the past, from the lightning...
And then he was slamming his brakes, pulling to the side of the freeway, with Janet reaching over to hug him.
“It’s the tumor,” she said, cupping his cheek. “Oh, Heston, what are we going to do?”
***
The pills made him sick. Radiation. Poison to match poison. His body became a battleground in which he felt the percussive blasts of mine and mortar and artillery every second of his waking life. He shit blood, and passed what felt like slivers of glass through his urethra every time he pissed. Worst of all, was the pain in his skull.
“…Like there’s a drummer in my brain,” he told his neighbor on the porch one night. “Pounds every few minutes, just to keep me from relaxing.”
Brad tipped his beer. “It’s probably that medication. My aunt had cancer. Bad headaches with those pills.”
Heston gazed through the bug screens of his wraparound porch, the summer evening gilding the Kentucky mountains. “It ain’t a headache, Brad.”
“What else could it be?”
Heston heard the whalesong, the locusts, felt it creep out through the trees with the deliberate murderousness of a predator. He smelled mud and the burn of ozone, felt the thu-thu-thump behind his temples, and then the night disappeared, collapsing backward, to the past, to the—
When he came back to himself Brad was out of his rocking chair, waving a hand before his eyes. “Hey buddy, come on back now.”
Heston realized he’d been looking at the halogen light over his garage; just staring at it.
“Heston?”
“I’m back,” he whispered. “I was just thinking.”
“What could you be thinking about for five minutes straight?”
Heston turned. “Five minutes?”
“Without blinking,” Brad added, emptying his beer. “Hellevuh concentration you got. M’self, I can’t sit still for more’n’a minute or two. It’s why I work in the garage with my hands. There’s a thousand pieces in an engine. More. And finding the one that’s broken is the trick, moving from bolt to bolt. Betty says it’s therapeutic for men to fix things. I say it’s better’n sittin’ on your ass.”
“Guess so,” Heston said, and looked into the mountains, wondering how long he had to live.
***
As
the weeks melted, Heston couldn’t decide if it was Janet or the tumor driving
him crazy. Each night, in bed, he wondered about her, the way she had looked at
the doctor when first they’d entered the hospital, the recognition that had
flashed between their eyes. He thought of the warm dye they’d injected into his
veins, the humming of the table conveying him slowly into the spinning circle
that would inevitably reveal his damnation. He thought of the instant before
he’d entered the moving ring of photographic radiation, of flicking his eyes
down toward the window and seeing Janet whispering into the doctor’s ear, both
of them watching from the hall.
***
He thought often of his conversation with Brad. And as the weeks turned to months, his neighbor’s words became a mantra: There’s a thousand pieces in an engine. And finding the one that’s broken is the trick, moving from bolt to bolt.
Heston moved from bolt to bolt, staring inward, sifting through the details that had led to his unraveling. He had been a happy man, son of a coal miner, spirited from Lynch, KY to this quiet suburb on the outskirts of Louisville. He’d escaped Harlan County by the skin of his teeth, taken work at the refinery, and done his best to love the girlfriend that had eventually become his wife. Janet had taken with child, and so they’d married to be right with The Lord, and, three weeks later, he’d found her weeping in the hallway, the bathroom door ajar, the fan buzzing and light bleeding into the darkness, catching her tears until her face seemed aglow with molten rivers. When, on occasion, he dreamed about that night, Janet’s face was burning. Just a bright prism of light, and her disembodied locust voice…
We lost her. We lost her, Heston.
And always the toilet was full of blood.
Heston remembered moving here, the neighbors all good people, bringing pies and casseroles to the porch as if there was no such thing as the Internet, or the satellite dish, or the communal atrophy instigated by America’s technological advancements. Here, in Sleepy Grove, the world whistled and waved and went to church just like Ike was still in office.
And yet…
There were small patterns he began to notice. Things he would have missed, if he’d not sworn himself to guard against the darkness.
Like how the bedroom lights on his block all went out at 10:00PM. Or the way the crickets stopped chirping every fifty-nine minutes for exactly twenty-seven seconds. He’d observed it countless nights, hoping to be proven wrong, that his radiation and the flexing pulses in his skull were affecting strange delusions. But they were there, without contradiction, all the pieces synchronized into some living, breathing clock.
There were eighteen houses on his block, over half of them occupied by married couples. They were healthy-looking average people, most below the age of forty. And unless they kept them hidden in the basement, and went to great lengths to hide their toys and bicycles, not one of them had children.
Then there was the evening ritual, the neighbors coming home at 5:00, 5:15, or 5:30. Never 5:16 or 5:07.
Never.
They began to stare at him, at his house. There he’d be on the upper floor, hidden by the lace drapes, his journal open in his lap, as the caravan came piling up the road, the garage doors opening in sync, and the cars rolling in. Some of his neighbors held briefcases, or purses, or groceries, a dead smile on their lips. Some paused on their doorsteps, tightening their shoulders and looking back. Not at Heston’s lawn, or at the house, itself.
But at his window.
***
The throb grew more pronounced. Ignoring it became impossible. And so, bolt by bolt, he studied it, noting the time, the intensity, logging everything in the moleskin journal that had become an encyclopedia of obsession.
It took him three weeks to find the pattern. 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 8 minutes, 13 minutes, 21 minutes, 34 minutes, 55 minutes, 89 minutes, 144 minutes, 233 minutes. At 377 minutes he’d invariably fall asleep.
But the pattern was there. Like the neighbors. Like the crickets.
Like the throb.
***
Four months after his diagnosis he stopped shaving. He’d always been a handsome man, but the cancer melted the muscle right off his body. His sunken cheekbones affected apprehension in those who met him on the streets. But by then, he understood, seeing the way they looked at him, the way they feared his discoveries.
Janet told him she was staying with her parents, though her tone suggested it might be longer than a week. She looked at him the way children study cats smashed flat upon the highway, a faraway pity glowing in her eyes, a thing she’d buried, not wanting to feel it.
“You’re not the same, Heston. I love you, but… you need some time to settle.”
Heston sat in the living room, not helping her with her bags, or bothering to mention that there were too many of them for such a short trip. He heard the blast of her Chrysler, the crunch of gravel, and the squeak of her bald tires turning North.
Then he went into the bathroom and opened his mouth in front of the mirror, holding his wristwatch up and counting down the seconds.
At exactly 5:58PM, thirty-four minutes since the last contraction, something flexed against the pink flesh of his soft pallet.
***
With Janet gone it was easier to think. After mulling over his research, he became convinced his condition was not cancerous, but something deliberate. He stopped taking his medication, fell victim to fits and violent spasms. But after a week of pissing blood, the pain began to subside. He could keep down solid food. The thrum in his skull lessened by noticeable degrees. And he began to remember.
***
The first time it hit he was standing in his basement, looking at his hiking boots hanging by their laces. Something about the mud in its treads brought a flash of blinding memory in which he floated on a sea of lightning, buoyed upward by the locust and whalesong and theremin hum, drawn closer to the things he could sense far above him, things with limitless curiosity.
And then he was on the cold cement, lifting himself in a fit of racking coughs and looking down to see the sweaty outline of his body. He stared up at the boots, the black mud, knowing this was important, and yet unable to connect the meanings struggling to take form.
The cramps in his brain made the basement flash. He dropped back to his knees, gripping his head and feeling the vibration, as if a small motor were running just inches beneath the bone. And then his nose began to bleed.
***
The second time he was standing by his truck. He looked at the driver door, and when he touched the cold steel of its handle, the smell of trees and awful heat overwhelmed him. Hot wires twisted in his forehead, and he collapsed against the rear tires, twisting to lean on his back.
The lightning came in another flash, and there he was, floating upward, screaming at the top of his lungs, though no sound pierced the womb. He saw the vague elongated outlines of machines made with living tissue, dark and gray, lined with elephant skin. He heard the soft dripping beeps and hisses, as of lungs and digesting intestines. And he smelled the mud. The heat. The—
“Heston!”
He came alive again, sinking to the gravel, unable to see, still trapped in that other place.
“Heston,” hands gripped his armpits, hoisting him easily, “I’m gonna call the ambulance. Just stay there. I’m—”
Heston pushed and saw Brad stumble back. He lifted his palms up. “Sorry I pushed you. I just got lightheaded. It’s the meds. They upset my equilibrium.”
“The meds?” Brad took a step back, looking at his house next door. “You’re still taking those, right?”
Heston didn’t like the way Brad said it, his syntax, his inference, all spoken with the affect of a father questioning his son about a crime already discovered.
Brad fixed his eyes, tilting his head. “Well? Are you on those meds or not?”
Heston jumped into his truck and locked the door, pulling the spare keys from the sun visor. His hands were shaking, and he couldn’t breathe. The keys dropped in the footwell and he jerked forward, smashing his head on the steering wheel and crying out. He scraped his palms on pebbles imbedded in the rubber mats, looped his finger through the key ring, sat up. and screamed.
Brad’s face was pressed to the window, the glass fogging against his grin. “Where you going, buddy? You can’t hightail it out’a here in your condition. Gonna wrap this truck around a telephone pole.”
“Get away from me!” Heston keyed the ignition. For one awful moment he didn’t think she would turn over, but then the solenoid rolled, and the tailpipe spit a cloud of black exhaust.
“Come on, Heston, we’re neighbors. What’s wrong with you? What the hell is—” Then the sideview mirror clipped Brad’s jaw, as the truck skidded backwards from the driveway, fishtailing in the road and speeding north.
***
Trees blurred against the purple sky as he sped through the old mining roads, hugging
the corners and spitting dust. He couldn't think about where he was going; indeed, the truck seemed to drive itself. The images of the side-view mirror
smashing into his neighbor’s skull replayed in a sickening loop. Over and over, he saw the steel edge clip Brad’s face,
saw the flesh bend inward like a rubber bladder, and pop back into shape.
It was impossible.
“But I saw it,” Heston whispered. “His skull bent just like rubber.”
Brad had run down the driveway after him, his smile full of teeth. “Come on, Heston! Running won’t do no good!” And staring back, Heston was next to sure the flesh of Brad’s face had been rippling.
Heston slammed the brakes when the campground came into view. So this was where he was heading. Back to old haunts, old playgrounds. He pulled the truck into the trees, bypassing the closed gate and spitting out onto the gravel drive five minutes later.
It was summer, and yet he saw no cars or RVs parked along the trees. He pulled to a stop at his favorite site, the grassy knoll climbing upward to a promontory lined with scrub oak and hickory. It was silent as a cemetery. Not even the crickets were chirping. Heston stepped into the humidity, waiting for the bugs to attack him, and not surprised to find that there weren’t any.
Then he saw the flat patch of grass, burnt gray in his headlights, the same patch upon which he had camped and stargazed for the last fifteen years. It was vaguely circular, burnt in the shape of his tent, the weeds crozzled to black stalks. Now that he thought of it, he hadn’t seen that tent anywhere, hadn’t been camping since last summer. He tried to remember where he’d put it, found that the trip itself was washed of details, trapped in fog.
A cannonade of thunder announced itself in the east.
Heston turned, and saw the flash of lightning—
—in
the sky, painting the world blue. The sizzle leaping down and striking the
trees of his campsite. Heston gasping for air, the sensation of hands wrapping around his throat. Heston
pulling on his boots as it flashes outside his tent, though there is no
thunder, no sound. The world, it seems, has been plunged under water. When he
rises, his boots leave the ground, and he tears through the canvas wall of his
tent as if its made of smoke, into an eternal brightness, heatless, immortal.
He hears the locusts and the warbling, though the sound is in his veins, in his
blood, a buried thriving thing just now awakened by the call of those who
placed it there.
And then the darkness, a ceiling of rippling blue that reminds him of an oven pilot, and he is paralyzed in the mud, feeling unseen things crawl across his body, squeezing with a certain intelligence…
Squeezing as if to test a peach for ripeness.
And then the noises of The Change, the breathing fleshy machines squeaking and crackling as they work on him, and the feeling of peace, of safety, coming through the locust shriek, soothing him as the flutesong soothes the cobra; and he is lifeless, watching and forgetting what he watches, surrendering to the song, allowing these pieces of horrific experience to be buried deep inside, buried within—
—His head.
Heston screamed, sure it had split open, that the warm dripping sensation overflowing his neck was blood. But when he fell sprawling in the burnt gray grass, wiping his ear and holding it up into the headlights, he saw that it was only rain.
***
He looked into the storm cell now above him. Veins of lightning flashed beneath gray cloud, lighting his eyes, his face. “What do you want?” he screamed. “What do you want with me?!”
And then he was running, aware that no place was safe, that the rhythm in his mind, in his neighborhood, was being synchronized from without. A source that hailed from darker skies, that’s inner chambers were floored with thick black mud, and walled in living flesh.
He somehow pulled himself into the truck, slamming the door and trembling, curling into himself and trying to banish the image of Brad’s face bending like an octopus.
He knew what he had to do. Knew, and was afraid.
***
“What are you doing here?” Janet jumped up from her parent’s couch. “It’s damn-near midnight, Heston. Why didn’t you just call?”
Heston stood on the other side of the screen, his face unreadable. Every so often his mouth twitched. “I want to know why you’re helping them.”
It was then she saw the madness in his face. “Helping who?”
“You know damnwell!” He kicked though the screen, grabbed her by her blonde bob-haircut and brought her to her knees with one yank. She screamed for her parents to call the police, that Heston had a gun, and then her words muffled as he drove the pistol into her mouth.
“Shut up, liar! Just shut up!”
She hushed with a quickness that could only mean she was guilty.
“Now don’t talk.”
“What’s going on down there?” came a voice from the stairs. When the white-haired man rushed down with a shotgun, Heston shot him through the knees. He folded, rolling headfirst and slamming into an armoire of fine china.
Heston dragged Janet by her hair, feeling the way the flesh stretched away from her scalp. And then Heston was standing over the man that had walked Janet down the aisle, his old lungs warbling and clicking, his eyes flickering white. “Heston,” the old man whispered, “Just let it come. Let it take you. Let it—”
Heston shot, spraying black brain matter across the wall. Then he turned the gun back on Janet. “How do I stop it? Tell me!”
“Stop what?”
“Don’t play dumb!” He hit her again; it was like hitting a water balloon. “I’ve put it all together. This whole place, quiet, beautiful, perfect. But where are all the children?”
Fear swept across her face.
“You can’t have any, can you? None of them can. It’s why you miscarried.”
“Heston, please, I love you.” The words came with passionless inflection.
He put the gun to her temple. “It’s like there was a hood pulled over my eyes. All those people, and no children. There’s a school, but I’ve never seen a child on the playground. I broke in before I came here. The rooms are all empty. Just white walls and gray floors. EMPTY!”
He pulled the slide of his gun for effect, then jammed it under her chin. “Now how do I get it out?”
“You can’t,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Some take longer than others. You’ve taken longest of all. Fifteen years they’ve been trying, Heston. You’re the last one. And somehow you still have the power to resist it. It’s remarkable. It fascinates them in ways you couldn’t imagine. You’re a miracle, Heston.”
“How far does this reach?” He looked back at his former father-in-law, saw his black blood moving along the wallpaper.
“Sleepy Grove for now. Even creatures as old as they have rules. Every subject must be loyal before expansion.”
“You’re sure?” He jerked her hair. “You’re not lying?”
Janet smiled, looking up at him, the flicker-flash of her eyes lighting the circulatory system in her head. Heston saw something like a root nest jerking beneath her skin before he pulled the trigger.
She hit the floor with a rubber squelch.
By the time Heston left, both Janet and her father were melting.
***
The news cameras were everywhere. Millions watched an emaciated man with a long brown beard hold the Mayor of Sleepy Grove near the bay windows of City Hall. The lunatic, identified as one Heston Glick, had strapped himself with explosives. He had his hand on the detonator switch, and he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
“THIS TOWN HAS BEEN INFILTRATED BY ANOTHER SPECIES OF LIFE. IT HAS TAKEN HOLD OF EVERY RESIDENT. THERE ARE NO CHILDREN IN SLEEPY GROVE. THIS SPECIES CANNOT REPRODUCE. THEY RELY INSTEAD ON INFECTION, ON TOTAL DOMINION. THE WORLD IS IN DANGER! CUT THEM OPEN! SEE FOR YOURSELF! THEIR BLOOD IS ALIVE! THEIR—”
And then the sniper’s bullet tore through Heston’s mouth, spraying a mottled red-black mess across the glass.
***
It has since become one of the media’s most violent and infamous scenes ever captured on film. It is regarded with the same reverence as Zapruder’s footage of JFK, or the moonwalk of Apollo 11. And like these films, it has bred an undercurrent of debate and secret meanings. There have been books written on the subject of Heston Glick, and documentaries tracking the mental decline of the once-quiet Kentuckian refinery foreman.
There is even one man who has traveled to colleges across the world, speaking out against the end, against the infestation of an Outer Species. This man has canonized the late Heston Glick. And each night, he concludes his lecture with the footage of what he calls “The Ultimate Assassination.”
There is a moment after the bullet hits, when the Mayor ducks and runs toward the circle of police. If one watches carefully they see Heston fall to his knees, his head lulling as a second bullet finds its mark. His body is thrown next to the bushes. It is here the lecturer pauses the film, highlighting the black cluster of tissue next to Glick’s body. Frame by frame, he inches the footage forward.
And frame by frame, the anonymous life form seems to locomote itself into the bushes.
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Damn. Good job. You are a good writer. This is Curtis, your old friend from Hermosa. I have writings I'm working on too. I had no idea the scope of your vocabulary. Leaps and bounds above me bro. You really know how to paint a picture with eloquent metaphors. I'm going to keep reading your work. You should hit me up. Look me up on facebook. Last name Page if you forgot.
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