Darkness Creeping (25 page)

A crowd began to gather around me. “Do you take requests?” one woman asked, and everyone laughed.

“My science project is in advanced biotechnology,” Roxy told everyone, making it up as she went along. “Soon things like iPods and earphones will be obsolete, because this new technology will deliver music right inside your skull.”

She talked on and on about it, but I couldn’t focus on her anymore, because the throbbing in my mouth was becoming sharper and sharper with the beat of every song.

When we got home, Dad was there. He had just returned from some top secret something or other, and was home long enough to change clothes and shower before his next assignment. He took one look in my mouth, declared it a federal disaster area, and demanded Püshpa take me to see a dentist, which confused her since to the best of her knowledge, a dentist had something to do with auto repair.

Dentists and I never got along. In fact, they usually requested that I never come back after the first appointment. I think this has something to do with my reflexes. See, I have this natural reflex that causes me to bite down with amazing force when someone puts something in my mouth, like, oh, say, a finger. Even though fingers can be surgically reattached these days, dentists did not appreciate the inconvenience, and I was listed on the American Dental Association Web site as Public Enemy number two. (You don’t want to know what Public Enemy number one did.)

“Is because you are bad little Jell-O-mold, Ralphy” Püshpa told me, after the tenth dentist hung up on her. “If I were a fishmonger, I wouldn’t help you either.”

“Never mind, Püshpa. Just pick up the eggplant and call another.”

It took days for us to find a dentist that would have anything to do with me. We finally found one willing to give me a phone consultation—but even then he sounded worried as he spoke to me, as if my voice might leap over the phone and gnaw off his ear.

“Tell me what you are experiencing,” he asked.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” I told him.

“Yes. Well. Sounds like it’s beyond my field of expertise. What you need is an endodontist.”

Throughout the conversation, he kept telling me to turn down the radio, and I couldn’t get him to understand that the music in my mouth was part of the problem. He hung up in frustration, but not before giving us the phone number of an endodontist who specialized in difficult cases.

As I understood, an endodontist was like a superdentist who ended the tireless march of oral bacteria like a can of Raid killed ants. Hence the title “End-o-dontist.”

“Open up, let’s see how bad it’s gotten,” Roxy said as soon as I got off the phone. I opened my mouth, and she peered inside. “Hmm,” she said. “Smells like teen spirit.”

I took a whiff of my underarms. I’m more of an Old Spice man myself.

“No, the song,” she said. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—you know? Nirvana? Kurt Cobain?”

“Oh. Oh, right.”

“
Here we are now, entertain us,
” sang Kurt.

“It sounds like an acoustic version,” said Roxy—which was fine with me, because songs with lots of bass were more painful.

Roxy listened for a few moments more. “I didn’t know they recorded an acoustic version,” she said. “Interesting . . . ”

The endodontic office was at the edge of the community beyond which were barren hills where only coyotes dared to roam. The small office complex had only two other tenants: a psychiatrist who specialized in Primal Scream Therapy and a school for the deaf.

The waiting room was empty and the whole place was decorated with some very odd pictures and artifacts. There was a little electric fountain that featured the
Titanic
, half submerged. There was a glass-encased thigh-bone that supposedly came from someone who died in the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. There were matching posters of the atomic bombs going off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in the center of it all was a sign that read REMEMBER THERE ARE WORSE THINGS THAN A ROOTCANAL.

Püshpa nodded her approval. “Is very comforting,” she said. “It puts things in persp . . . in persp . . . what is word?”

“Perspiration,” Roxie and I said in unison.

“Yes, yes. Puts things in perspiration.”

From behind a door that said NO ADMITTANCE! came two large women with dark braided pigtails and shoulders like football players, which seemed even broader beneath their white dentists coats.

One of them smiled broadly. “Hello, we’re the Von Suffrin sisters. We’ll be working on your tooth today.”

“Tag-team dentistry!” said Roxy, flipping the page of her magazine. “This should be good.”

The smiling sister smiled a bit wider. The other one didn’t smile at all. It’s possible that the second sister was actually a man, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Why don’t I go get the room ready,” said the sister with the Adam’s apple. Then she disappeared behind the “No Admittance” door. The smiling sister sat down beside me, picked up a clipboard, and pulled out a pen from a pen holder shaped like Mount Vesuvius. She then proceeded to take down pertinent information, like name, birthday, and what I might like on my tombstone.

“Are you the next of kin?” she asked Püshpa.

“No,” answered Püshpa, “I am the Jell-O-mold’s nanny. Their schnauzer is out of town. Would you like to call him? I have eggplant in purse.”

Dr. Von Suffrin, to her credit, didn’t even blink. “I see. No, thanks. If I need to call, we have plenty of vegetables of our own.” She turned to me. “Are you ready, Ralphy?”

Just then a scream came through the walls, a sound raw and bloodcurdling. It rattled the window and made the thighbone vibrate in its case.

“No,” I answered.

“Oh, don’t worry about that—it’s just from the therapist’s office next door. He has people scream to release their anxiety. You should try it sometime.”

She took my hand firmly and led me through the door into the dark recesses of the Von Suffrin inner sanctum.

The room they led me to had state-of-the-art dental equipment, all done in shiny black plastic and black leather. It looked like Darth Vader’s dental chair. I sat down, staring face-to-face with an X-ray machine that looked like the head of a giant praying mantis.

As for the chair, it was comfortable.
Too
comfortable. It was clearly designed to lull a person into a false sense of security. There was a TV suspended from the ceiling that played the director’s cut of
Jaws
. Beside the chair there was a whole host of chrome dental equipment that made my eyeballs begin to ache. In addition to the usual drills, mirrors, and poky things, there were some oddly shaped devices that didn’t seem designed for human anatomy at all.

“Uh . . . what are those for?” I asked.

“Oh, those?” said the sister with the beard stubble. “Those are just in case.”

The other sister held up a gas mask that looked large enough to swallow my entire head. “You can either remain conscious, or we can put you out. Which would you prefer?”

Well, I would rather have been unconscious, but I didn’t trust the Von Suffrins. If they put me under, my organs might end up being auctioned on eBay.

“I think I’ll stay awake.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “Now let’s have a look at that tooth.”

I opened my mouth and presented her with the voice of Elvis Presley as he crooned “
Hunk-a-hunk-a-burning love . . .
”

She frowned, and turned to her sister. “Lucretia, could you come over here and have a look at this?”

“Certainly, Lizzy.”

They both peered into my mouth, and looked at each other shaking their heads and alternately raising their eyebrows like they were communicating telepathically.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“We’ve only seen this once before,” said Lizzy. “You’ve got yourself an abscessed abyssal bacterial nexus.”

“Is that bad?”

“That depends on your definition of ‘bad,’” she said, pointing to a poster of Atlantis being swallowed by the sea. Lizzy smiled even more widely than before, then attached a metallic device to my head which she called “an appliance.” It looked like a bear trap, and had teeth as sharp as Bruce the Shark, who was currently chewing Captain Quint in half on the plasma TV screen. Then she produced a hypodermic syringe about the size of an antiaircraft gun and injected a massive dose of novocaine into various points in my gums.

“Lucretia,” she said, “we’re going to need the big drill for this one.” Lucretia nodded, put down her cigar, and went over to a padlocked cabinet.

I have had some painful experiences in my life. There was the “ice-pick incident” for instance, for which one of our former nannies was still serving prison time. Then there was the time I learned how unwise it is to dirt-bike through a cactus garden. But nothing in the known world could compare with the agony I endured at the hands of Lizzy and Lucretia Von Suffrin.

First off, all that novocaine numbed every nerve in my body, except for the nerve in my tooth. “How strange,” said Lizzy, her smile growing ever wider. “Well, maybe if we keep drilling, we’ll get past the pain. Eventually.”

But there was nothing past the pain but more pain. I screamed long and loud—but it didn’t matter—and now I knew why they chose to locate their offices here. My screams were camouflaged by the screams coming from the therapist’s office—and for obvious reasons, no one at the school for the deaf was very concerned.

All the while, the music in my mouth kept getting louder and louder until it rivaled the grating drone of the drill—and when Jimmy Hendrix began wailing on his electric guitar, I was ready to be put out of my misery.

“I’ll take that gas now,” I told them, but it was no use. With my jaw locked in the “appliance,” all that came out of my mouth was “I—AAH—YA—YA—OWWW.”

“Patience, kid,” said Lucretia. “It’ll all be over soon.” Then she pulled out a fresh drill bit that looked like it was meant for drilling for oil. It flexed like a plumbing snake.

Now the music was blasting louder than the drill, but Lizzy and Lucretia were too involved to care. “Almost there,” Lucretia said. The long drill bit had completely disappeared into my mouth, and was in so deep, I thought it ought to be coming out of my . . . uh . . . toes. And as if to mock my pain, “La Bamba” blasted its joyful salsa rhythm into the room.

That’s when I finally made the connection. Richie Valens, the guy who sang the original “La Bamba,” had died in a plane crash. So did Patsy Cline, who sang “Who’s Sorry Now?” And Jimmy Hendrix overdosed . . . Come to think of it, every song coming out of my mouth was sung by someone who died an unexpected, unpleasant death. But death was not the end for them, and now I knew there was a place where all tragically terminated musicians go . . . because I wasn’t just pulling in some random radio station—my cavity was so infinitely deep, it had become a wormhole to an alternate dimension!

“Just a little bit further . . .” said Lucretia, practically on top of me now, her knee on my chest, and her entire hand shoved in my appliance-stretched mouth down to the wrist.

“
Para bailar la Bamba,
” sang Richie Valens.

“We’re almost there—I can feel it,” said Lizzy.

“
Para bailar la Bamba se necesita una poca de gracia . . .
”

There was a whistling in the air now, like wind tearing through a forest, but neither of them heard it—Lizzy was too involved in her relentless drilling, and Lucretia was focused on holding down my jerking arms and legs. Soon the wind grew, drowning out the song, until it sounded like a freight train crashing through the room. Their pigtails were whipping in the wind—a wind that was funneling right into my mouth.

“Wait! Wait—I see something in there!” shouted Lizzy over the wind. “Oh my God! It’s . . . It’s—”

But she never finished because suddenly my tooth raged in pain, my mouth felt extremely full, and she was gone. Lizzy Von Suffrin, D.D.S., was sucked right into the wormhole.