Calhoun and the Space Worm - (a gutshot legbreaker finds himself in the crossfire of a cosmic conspiracy) a short story

Calhoun snuck out of the motel when the Arizona sun was hot and high, with no notion of where he was headed. She was with him still. Twice now he’d bribed or threatened her to swear off this chase to nowhere, had even raised his hand to strike her but pulled free at the last moment. She was made of iron, Helen. He’d taken to calling her Helen of Troy in his mind, which was where most of Calhoun’s words occurred.

“The Indians in these parts all spoke of a deluge,” Helen was saying now, while he studied the heat-spirals leading upward through the hills. The Cadillac had overheated again and she was pouring water into the radiator. “Sedona is full of their power. But really, when you think about it, power isn’t owned. It’s inherited. Some people just kind of find it. People are funny, too. If they can’t fuck it or eat it, they try to sell it to you.”

A heliograph of refracted light skated across Calhoun’s face as she pulled the glass pepper shaker from her purse. His heavy amber eyes rolled up. Slow. This fucking heat would kill him. “Pepper?”

“From the diner in Barstow.” She shrugged without embarrassment. “My dad taught me this.”

Before Calhoun could stop her, she’d dumped the entire pepper shaker into the radiator. “Hush up, now. The pepper clots in the heat and pressure. It’ll plug that hole long enough to get up these hills.”

Calhoun looked down at his abdomen and wheezed. The leaden stiffness felt purple. He wouldn’t say that out loud, that a feeling could be a color, but in the fourteen hours everything had changed and he wasn’t exactly sure of much. That purple weight spread now in a corona of pain and lightning. If he closed his eyes, it seemed he could see it flashing stormlike to the rhythm of his breath. The blood was dry but the sweat made it sticky. When he came back to his body in the hot dusty shoulder of the road, she was looking at him.

“You sure it went straight through?”

Calhoun nodded. “Ain’t the first time I’ve been shot.”

*

The Cadillac made it, and in making it Calhoun found himself scooped into the tidepool of his mind. There again beneath the warehouse roof in Wilmington, California, where he’d gone to save the one man he wouldn’t kill. And that man looking up at him with tears in his eyes and a chest full of holes. That man wheezing words that sounded like some foreign poem on air aswirl with dust and gunsmoke. That man brushing his cheek in the moment before the body disgorged whatever spark made present the daring rascality the world had known as Janson Cray, and whispering with breath that smelled of spice and Kools and maybe even magic: The weight is yours to carry, old friend. Head to the desert. They’ll be coming now. You’ll know more as you get closer.

He didn’t fucking know a thing. Only that two men in gray suits, the type you can buy three of for a hundred dollars, accosted him not ten red minutes after he’d abandoned the corpse of his childhood friend. The men were smooth as riverstones and dark as myth. Nubian was the word he’d think of later, when he finally got Helen to stop hyperventilating. But in that moment he only puzzled over the way the skin of their cheeks didn’t crease with their smile.

“Jansen Cray is dead,” the bigger one said by way of greeting. “We felt him leave.”

Calhoun reached for his gun. “And who the fuck are you?”

“Elm,” the smaller of the two said, pointing to the bigger one with his chin. “And this is Ash.”

“Cute names.”

“Mr. Cray felt lighter on his passage out, is what my partner meant to say.” Elm smiled an apology. “We believe he offered you something we’d like to collect before making our way.”

Calhoun slipped his hand around the butt, wiggling it slowly from his belt. “There wasn’t much in the way of offering.” But even as Calhoun said it, Jansen’s words skated in a cold wind up his back: the weight is yours to carry, old friend. “How about you two shitbirds clear a path for old Calhoun?”

“Names have power,” Ash, the big one, said. “Calhoooooooun.” He let the word roll in his mouth and his eyes went white as eggshells. The air between them thickened with an audible ripple.

“Calhooooooun.” This time the yellowed receipts and old trash-scatter in the parking lot began to lift as if in eddies of muddy water.

Calhoun tried to breathe and felt the air rush like cold jelly into his throat.

“Cal—” was as far as Ash got before Calhoun pulled the Glock g21 and fired.

The bullet pocked and flowered the air in a visible tunnel before punching through Ash’s forehead, driving his head back with the force of a golf swing. He hit the ground so hard his legs lifted. And miracle of God, Calhoun could breathe.

“You don’t understand what you’re carrying,” Elm lifted his hands and backed away. “We’re here to help you, not—”

But then Elm was dead and Calhoun was leaning against his knees, trying to stand. He was out of breath, swimmy, like he was going to puke. When he looked up, the moon was gone. Like someone had cut a hole right through the sky. The dizziness made his bones feel hollow, birdlike. He envisioned all six and a half feet of him being lifted into that skyhole like dregs into a straw. Growing wings. Crowing ravensong in an arc of burning feathers.

That’s when he heard the muffled screaming, turned left, and saw the Cadillac. It was white with rusted tail fins, a 63’, the kind of cream plush seats that drank cigarette smoke and rocked children to sleep on long drives. A woman’s voice was coming from the trunk. “Let me go. Help. Help.”

Calhoun looked back and the moon was where it should be. His bones were filled with marrow, not air. And the two men—men, he told himself emphatically—were lying dead where he’d shot them. No floating trash. No cold jelly in his lungs.

He fished keys out of Ash’s cheap gray suit and approached the trunk without speaking. It must have been the sound of the keys jangling that caused what happened next. A gimlet of steel punched outward below the Cadillac emblem and a bullet spiked through the left side of his gut.

He stared in disbelief at the pancaking blood and back at the dead men that could have killed him and shook his head. “You fucking kidding me?”

“Who’s there?” A pause. “Who are you?”

“The fucking guy you shot. Calhoun.”

“Who?”

He cursed under his breath and opened the trunk and buried his gun into the cheek of the girl he’d soon call Helen of Troy and snatched her .22 and threw it hard behind him. “Calhoun. Now who the fuck are you?”

She peeked her head out slowly, unbothered by the warm barrel dimpling her cheek, until she saw the bodies in the cheap suits lying in the parking lot. Her nose was bleeding but she made no move to wipe it. “They aren’t dead. We have to go.” She jumped out, stripped the remnants of chewed duct tape from her wrists, and held out her hand. “I’ll drive.”

“Like hell.”

“You’ve been shot, I mean, by me, but I didn’t mean to, I thought you were them, and-”

“Slow down before I shoot back. What do you mean they aren’t dead? Who are you?”

“Helen. Now listen to me, there’s no time to tell you everything. We’ll do it in the car. Those two aren’t men. It won't take long for their wounds to heal.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Please. I’ll tell you everything as long as we’re driving.” She wouldn’t stop looking at the bodies. “Please, Calhoun. I’m sorry I shot you. Can we leave now?” 

Calhoun considered. Then handed her the keys. “You shoot me again, you better kill me, lady.”  

*

The road unspooled between ponderosa pines, up and up into hills the red of clay. He chewed a bit on memories and squinted as the sun played tricks in the bug guts on the windshield. By his figuring, the world would be just fine. The whole heaping ugly bitch she was would find a way to heal better than his stomach ever would. When he glanced over, Helen looked like she was sleeping. But then she spoke. Her nose began to bleed.

“I dreamt this.”

“What now?”

“This road. The smell of your sweat, your blood. All of it.” She cracked the window and lit a cigarette and focused on the ribbon of smoke being sucked into the wind. “We’re gonna die in these hills, I think.”

“Oh yeah? You dream that too?”

“Sarcasm won’t shield prophecy.”

“I was unaware I was sitting next to John the Baptist. Must’ve been the tits that threw me off.”

She laughed and it was nice in a way exhausted lonely things are sometimes lovely. Her eyes flicked up. He thought of jaguars in the jungle, predators evolved to take a crocodile by the neck and drag it back to shore. “How much did you know about Jansen?”

“My first girlfriend became his first girlfriend. We pissed off the top of the Hoover Damn together in sixth grade and stole sex ad newspapers from the Vegas strip in the same day.” And then a hitch was in his guts and he closed his mouth and focused on the road. “Cray was like a little brother. We were the same age but…”

“So you know about EONS?”

“Huh?”

She smiled again and took a drag. “The Esoteric Order of Natural Sciences. EONS. That’s where we met.”

“Shitty name for a club.”

“It’s not a club. It’s a movement. A fraternity bridging the incorporeal and physical nature of existence. Antoni Poli was the founder. Geneva. The Poli massacre. Any of this ring a bell, Brutus?”

“Call me Brutus again and I’ll ring your bell.” He tried to make it sound funny but there was no humor in him. Clouds were gathering on the ridgeline and clots of black vapor scarred the open space beneath. “So those two I shot were with EONS?”

“I don’t know what those two were. Jansen penetrated the upper crust. Spent a month in Geneva, picking through the dust of what Antoni Poli left behind. Came to a kind of theory on his own.”

“And you know this how?”

“We were lovers. I was in Geneva too.”

Calhoun wasn’t the fastest thinker but something about the way she said it pulled at his ribcage. Jansen had been plugged with holes when he found him. No shooter in sight. The men in the parking lot had been waiting for him. But the Cadillac hadn’t been there when he’d stepped from the taxi. “He called me before I found him that way.”

Had she stiffened a bit or was he getting testy for no reason?

“What did he say to you?”

“To come alone. No car. He had something he had to show me. Those two shot him before I got there, didn’t they?” But they hadn’t had weapons. He’d checked. And her in the trunk with that .22, just waiting. He turned and looked at her but she just smoked. “What the fuck were you into, and why aren’t you talking?”

“He didn’t tell me. He left me six months ago. It wasn’t like being broken up with. It was like ... watching someone die. Whatever he found out there ate him like cancer. It became his whole life.”

“So you brought those two to see to him?”

“No, it isn’t like that.”

“Well, how the fuck is it, Helen?” His gun was in his hand like magic. “Speak up.”

“Oh please. You’re not gonna shoot me, Calhoun.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I didn’t dream it.”

*

Calhoun didn’t shoot her. About the time he decided there was a lot more going on here than he was ready to penetrate, the Cadillac’s temperature needle started creeping to the right. He dropped it into first and threw the hazards on, mostly because he was stubborn.

“They’re honking a goddamn storm.” Helen was looking back, biting her lip the way Calhoun used to in diners when his father would try to plant a hair in his chili. A kind of embarrassed powerlessness. “Maybe we should pull over and wait a while.”

Calhoun pointed to the big green sign on the right shoulder, backfilled by trees marching out and up the sharp inclines that steepened all around them. Like driving through an open mouth. 

Helen tracked his finger and something like a wave traveled beneath the skin of her face. Her eyes widened, then narrowed on reflex. “Jerome.”

“We’re almost there,” he said.

“Almost where?”

“Further.”

*

The town was carved into the side of a cliff, the roads winding and broken by the shifting earth. Buildings leaned dangerously against dykes and braces. Tourists milled on the lumpen asphalt streets, crowding themselves before the Asylum, the haunted brothel, the steep lookouts that peaked between the paint-peeled houses. This was like a thousand places Calhoun had been before, yet wholly different in a way only his stomach could feel.

“This oughtta do it.” Calhoun pulled into a parking spot on the slanted street next to a van filled with mentally disabled children. Calhoun locked eyes with a woman who could have been 26 or 46, the fixity of age replaced by a chromosome. “This place feel weird to you?”

“No, why?” She said it quick, looked away after it was out.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Don’t accuse me of lying.”

“You telling me you’re not lying? That you haven’t been lying this whole goddamn time?” And now the memory of Jansen’s hot breath, the undertone of meat, of ammonia, was in his nose, and his heartbeat was pounding in the purple storm of his punctured abdomen. “I mean it. This place feels like, shit, I don’t know.”

“Like we were meant to come here,” she finished.

“I don’t know about all that.” And as he said it, he could see Jansen’s eyes, the laughter in them, like he’d gotten away with the best con this side of the century. The weight is yours to carry, old friend. And wasn’t it strange, now that he thought of it, the way he got from the interior of the warehouse to a littered parking lot. How he’d just left Jansen there without calling anyone, without doing anything. He tried to recall the shape of the doorway, the hallways, the big rusted double doors he’d pushed in to find Jansen laying in the dust. The frames had been edited. They were gone.

“What?” Helen asked.

“Nothin. Tell me what you found in Switzerland.”

“I didn’t find anything. He did.”

“Found what, smartass?”

“I’m not being smart. I didn’t find it. He couldn’t show it to me. It’s not a thing, Calhoun. It’s more like a cloud.”

“A fuckin cloud?”

“Not a raincloud. Like a digital archive, but not digital. Organic. A type of conscious mainframe that’s access points are limitless. Oh, don’t look at me like that.” She hesitated, then turned the key and turned on the radio. Static buzzed, chopped through with stations, as she turned the tuner. “Think of it like a radio. These songs have been playing the whole time but we can’t hear it without an antenna. A cellphone can’t access its cloud without atuning to the proper channel. Do you understand yet?”

“Jansen downloaded something in Switzerland?”

“Yes.” She looked at him and wiped the blood from her nose. It was trickling. “Into himself.”

*

Calhoun stopped into a pharmacy with yellowed windows and snatched three rolls of gauze and a liter of isopropil. At the register, he eyed a young man. A beard and a baseball cap. Looked the type that drank and acted bigger than he was. He wouldn’t look Calhoun in the eyes, a clear foot above his head, even though the counter area was on a riser. “Bathroom?”

The boy slid a key as Calhoun slid a fifty. They eyed the bloody thumbprint together. 

Calhoun winked. “Keep the change.”

When he was done, the bathroom sink was webbed with the rusty color blood will make of porcelain and he was pretty sure the diner napkins he’d used to plug his gut hole had clogged the septic. The bullet had gone straight through and most of the bleeding was down his back. His underwear were now a dark maroon. His heavy abdomen, with the criss-cross of gauze, reminded him of the cured meat sold in European markets.

“Fuck,” he told the mirror. “Jansen, you son of a bitch, what am I do--”

Images arced through his bones, punched into the panel of his underbrain like a gasket blown through steel.  

Great stone structures being manipulated into place by robed hierophants twice as tall as any man, the stones themselves being quarried by a livestock of blind white larvae. A flaming orifice of color cannibalizing itself into the center of a starry void. Behemoth worms burrowing themselves into planetary magma, hardening through millennia to become mountains, valleys, caves. An ocean of sound and image and symbol and word folded within a flower reversing into its bud, down and deep and back into the dark. He was in the dark too. Jansen, naked and smiling, with eight holes in his torso, was in the dark with him. Everything was in the dark. 

Calhoun broke through the fever standing next to Helen, who was halfway through what she was saying: “-Places like this. He knew about them. We’d talk sometimes near the end when he’d be too high on opium to stop himself. He told me with the right attunement a man could cut his own throat and will the blood to stay where it was. Once, he passed a paring knife through three of his fingers and wiggled the hand right in front of me. I checked the wood after and felt the groove myself. Something about molecules. Antoni Poli called it the carbon rudiments. Carbon can be anything it wants. Magicians have a way of speaking to elements. Rearranging them. Eons believed magicians were actually scientists.”

Calhoun was too busy staring at the craggy mouth in the mountainside. He could smell burning coolant, turned to see the Cadillac parked up on a berm next to a padlocked cattle gait. The desert sunset would have been beautiful if not for the incessant pounding in his skull. Darkness. He remembered then and jerked the way a man will jerk during a good piss. “How long since we left the pharmacy?”

Helen’s nose was bleeding from both nostrils, tattooing her chin like a Comanche. Had he hit her? “Three hours.”

“Three hours.” Calhoun scratched his ass to think, the bloody underwear like a cast. “Did I say anything?”

“You said this was where Jansen wanted us to go.”

“Fuck with me and that nosebleed’s gonna get worse.” He thought some. “What else did I say?”

“That they’d be here with us.” Helen watched the winding road below and pointed. “Speak of the devil.”

Calhoun turned and saw a puke green ‘67 Chevy take the bend, its struts whining. The two bald heads behind the windshield were unmistakable. “What else?”

“That it would end here. And also begin.” Her voice distant now, losing pressure. “You went away, didn’t you? What did he show you?”

“Some kind of … I don’t know … fucking space worm. What’s--” But then Helen’s eyes snapped back into her head and Calhoun lunged to catch her before she fell. “Shit.”

He threw her over his shoulder and loped like a gored buffalo for the cave mouth, the Gypsum mine covered in warnings of instability, pictographs of falling rocks, pictures, images, like the ones he saw in the flower, like the ones Jansen downloaded from the cloud. Helen began to jerk. Between that and the gunshot Calhoun made it ten feet from the cave when the sound of the engine died and two doors slammed shut behind him.

“Wait!” It was Elm, the smaller of the Nubians. No, he thought, Egyptians. Calhoun wasn’t quite sure where this certainty came from but sure as shit, when he turned, they looked like mummies waiting to be wrapped. Elm still had blood on his suit but his forehead was smooth as an eight ball. No bullet hole. The big one, Ash, was smiling.

Calhoun pulled his Glock. “Try that Calhoun shit again and you’re in for a double feature.”

“We only want what Mr. Cray gave you,” Elm said.

“Only thing he gave me was a headache.” He shot the big one in the face, watched it punch like a gimlet an inch below his eye. Ash’s body ran forward four full steps before it fell.

“Wait!” Elm looked annoyed, not afraid. “Stop shooting us.”

“Doesn’t seem to work.” Calhoun shot Elm in the shoulder. “What are you? A fucking Wizard?”

“What we are isn’t important. What Janson Cray gave you is.”

Calhoun squinted his eyes, Helen still jerking on his shoulder. He looked at Ash face-down in the dust and scratched his cheek with the barrel, thinking maybe he ought to stop shooting them. “From the cloud, right?”

“The cloud?” Elm looked confused. “You carry history.”

“History?”

“From time beyond history. The poem of civilizations. Everything, Calhoun. What Janson Cray escaped with is not just our world, but all worlds that were and are to be. History is a web. One strand touches all strands.”

“Speak some sense or I’ll shoot you,” he leveled the pistol and tipped it down, “Right in your wizard pecker.” Helen wasn’t just jerking now, she was bucking.

“Was her nose bleeding?” Elm asked suddenly. And when he saw Calhoun’s reaction: “Set her down. Quickly!”

Calhoun did it as gently as he could with one arm and a bullet hole in his gut. “Stay where you are.”

“Let us help.” Elm dropped to one knee and held his open hands above the dust, let Calhoun watch long enough to see the open space beneath his palms fill in eddies of copper powder. “She’s been exposed. It’s changing her!”

“What’s changing her?”

But about that time two barbed appendages punched up through Helen's chest.

*

The space worm cracked her like a nut, leaving two pieces behind as it slithered from the pit of Helen’s ribcage in a cloud of bloody vapor.

“Fuck!” Calhoun shot what to him looked like a white slug but for its two front legs. It moved fast, punching at the earth like the forelegs of a grasshopper. He shot one of its legs off, but six more punched free. Ridges rose from its fleshy center, like knuckles through dough. The blubbery skin peeled off and lay smoking in the dust. “Shit,” Calhoun whispered. “I hate spiders.”

He walked right at it, emptied the clip into its shell, watched it jerk forward and backward while he screamed. He dry fired four times before he realized he would die up here, in this burnt out mine, pursued by Egyptian wizards and eaten by a spider he’d watched crawl from a woman’s chest. Jesus, if life wasn’t silly.

It leapt for him and he rolled with its momentum and kicked up with both knees, watched it flip ass over teakettle across the bloody kaleidoscope sunset like a crab through a molten sea. He closed his eyes, heard the thumps and grunts of Elm, and rolled over just in time to see what looked like lightning effloresce from the small man’s hands. The screech was like something straight from Hell’s Greatest Hits. When he got his eyesight back, Elm and Ash were standing over him.

“That was quick.”

Their palms and a hot white light was the last thing he saw. There was no sound but for the chorus of voices, their dreams and agonies wefted into a single resonance that made him want to cry.
Well, ain’t that pretty, he thought before the darkness that contained the flower opened its mouth and swallowed all that crimson sunset light.

*

Calhoun awoke much later, on the road. He jerked and skated into the shoulder before correcting the wheel. His guts hurt something awful, but he was in the desert now, deeper, no pines, no hills, just the pale white skin of East Texas. He’d know that desert carcass anywhere.

He lifted his shirt to make sure he was still shot, that he hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. The puckered purple sinkhole was there beneath the criss-crossed gauze, now the dark brown of terra cotta. “Shit.”

He pulled over on the shoulder and rolled it through his mind. He felt emptier, like maybe they’d taken a little more than what old Jansen Cray had stowed away. “Shit,” he said again, thinking of the eight holes in Janson’s chest, the eight legs of the spider, thinking of Elm, his smooth dark face saying, was her nose bleeding? and she’s been exposed.

“History is a web,” he said. “A web that’s guarded by a spider.”

That made Calhoun giggle. There was no joy in it, just an appreciation for the absurd. He checked the temperature gauge of the Cadillac, signaled with his blinker, and pulled back onto the empty highway. It was close to dawn.

By the time the sun opened its eye across the earth, Calhoun’s nose began to bleed.