Unseaming (8 page)

I barely heard him. A pall of familiarity had settled over this strange new landscape. The mottled plain I perceived far below might be nothing more than a mite’s-eye view of carpet. The pillar we looked out from, and the identical ones looming to either side, nothing more than bars of a crib.

An evil shape, unimaginably huge, approached through the greater darkness, its titanic footfalls muffled by the stagnant air. Amorphous, mottled with shifting light and shadow, it towered into the gray sky. I backed away, meaning to hide, but Humpty whispered, “No! Stay. Watch.”

From behind us, a burst of blue light suddenly cast the shifting form into full relief—my father, his broad bare chest, his thin sinewy arms, bulbous belly, the malformed moon of his face. He opened his mouth and an orange jack-o’-lantern glow gushed in a stream from his throat. Behind us, a horrible scream rose, as my father’s ectoplasmic vomitus bored through a sudden blue light, and I screamed too, in recognition.

* * *

It felt like a tongue, a sandpapery cat’s tongue, scouring me out from the inside.

Hollowing me out…

My father’s demon visage hovered over me, his skull outlined in flame beneath his skin, a monstrous sun over the well of my crib. That stream of yellow spiraling out of his mouth, burrowing into me. I knew the blue shining out of me was my defense, my only way to fend him off, but I didn’t know how to use it. I didn’t know how.

* * *

“Good,” Humpty whispered. “You remember. But do you understand?”

The stage was empty again; my father had vanished.

“Understand what? What was he doing to me?”

“You don’t know, Michael? After all
you’ve
done?”

The temptation to hurl my tormentor off the balcony returned. I thought about how his strange flesh would feel, tearing apart underneath my grip. “You’re on thin ice. I don’t care what kind of little god you might be here. Don’t talk in circles. Tell me what this is about.”

Humpty curled his limbs into the grillwork of the rail. His smoldering eye-socket winked at me. “I should have known. Here inside your macrocosm, you’re insulated from who you are. Here, you’re what you want to be.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“No, foam.” He grinned. All his teeth were restored. “So who are you, really? And whose apartment are we in?”

I knelt down to glare at this demon from my past, eyes to eye. “My name is Michael Carver. And this is my apartment. If you weren’t in my head, I’d be looking down on Salem Boulevard right now.”

“Wrong. This is Melissa’s apartment. Or at least that’s the name she gave you. If you weren’t outside space-time, the view you’d see from here would be the view you had when you tipped her body out over the street.”

A worm slithered inside me. Humpty casually unwound one of his arms, held out a hand as if offering change to a beggar. “Would you like me to tell you what you did to her before you pitched her into the dark?”

My fingers crooked into claws. “This is a dream, and this is a lie.”

“The T-shirt you’re wearing.” His free hand tugged at my collar. “It belongs to Jerry Coolidge. You remember him?”

“My name is Michael Carver. I live here above Salem Boulevard. I fucking flip burgers for a living, stay home at night and try to write music. I’ve even sold jingles to a local auto dealership.”

“You met Jerry at…the kind of establishment you frequent, and invited him back to your domicile, which looks nothing like this. He even agreed to the handcuffs. Then you strangled him.”

I grabbed for himm—his teeth gnashed, even more of them shattering—but my fingers were suddenly on fire. When I held my hand up, the slashes across my knuckles were outlined in radioactive green. They faded as I watched, the sting that accompanied them lingering a few seconds more.

“See,” he said, “I’m more dangerous then you think. Just hear me out.”

“No. My name is Michael Carver. These calluses on my hands come from plucking guitar strings, thinking notes out loud. I would never do what you’re accusing me of.”

“But you do, all the time. You don’t flip burgers, Michael. You work in a slaughter house. You line up the necks of turkeys so that the spinning blades cut their throats. The little peeping sound they make when they die drives you absolutely ape. You couldn’t even finger the first chord on a guitar neck. Carver isn’t even your last name. It’s what you
do
.”

My insides writhed. “That’s not true.”

Humpty’s fiery eye-socket narrowed. “Would you like it not to be true?”

What if it wasn’t a dream? What if it wasn’t? “Yes. Okay. How?”

“We have to leave this place.”

Whether I was dreaming or truly in another universe, it made sense to me to follow this homunculus from my childhood and bring this nightmare to a quick end. And wake up to what? Fingering guitar strings above a flow of headlights, or dried blood, sweat, and a stink of death in my pores?

Strutting like a majorette, he lead me out into a featureless hallway that terminated in stairs. “They’re steep,” he remarked. “Be careful.”

The stairs plunged in a tight spiral. Their texture gradually changed, from the rugged carpeting of my apartment complex to the warped and creaking boards of my grandfather’s house, that conglomeration of peeling plaster and rotting wood where my father raised me. Humpty scurried before me on all fours.

I called down to him, “Why are you helping me? I made my father shred you into pieces.”

The glint of green that was his eye-socket paused in shadow. “There’s no more time. Even using the shortcut of your macrocosm, I nearly found you too late.” He continued his descent. “Right now, within the bounds of normal space-time, the police are on their way to your flat. And they’re going to find the things you have stuffed under your bed. And they’ll find what you have soaking in your bathtub.”

“I told you I haven’t done anything.”

“Once they find those things, once you’re caught, it’s all over. Too many other time-streams mingled with yours. It won’t be possible to fix what your father did.”

We emerged from a portal, began a hike across the convoluted terrain of sheets and blankets. Cresting a fold, I beheld the remains of my childhood. The body I wore in infancy, a boneless shell, a shriveled egg case. Empty eyeholes stared in wildly different directions from my collapsed, deflated face.

“He’s in there,” Humpty said. Your father.”

* * *

We ascended the spongy slope of a boneless cheek, lowered ourselves into the fleshy cavern of an empty eye. “He lives here now,” said Humpty. “If you want to save yourself, you’ll have to evict him.”

“How?” No answer came. Humpty had vanished, swallowed up, it seemed, in the folds of my childhood’s hollowed-out husk. This abandonment brought only a moment’s panic, quickly replaced by relief. That creature was no source of nostalgia; I was glad he’d left me.

I continued the descent, intent on bringing this ordeal to its conclusion. I clambered down through the optic nerve channel, through a heavy wooden trapdoor, into a space I assumed to be my own skull cavity. But it was my father’s cluttered study, a room I’d only seen via forbidden glimpses through a keyhole while my father was still alive. The same room where he’d finally had his heart attack.

He was seated at his desk, digging a fountain pen into a cut on his hand, using the blood to write in a book. All at once he started, looked up at me and bellowed, “What the
hell
are you doing in here?”

“This is my universe,” I said. “You don’t belong in it.”

“The hell I don’t. I created everything here, including you.” He stood up.

“You scooped this out of me. You stole the life that belonged to me.” I could feel the blue aura building inside me that I’d been helpless to use as a child, that I never had learned to use.

“Shut up!” Fire erupted from his mouth. Suddenly I was blind. I stumbled over something and fell, my face a mask of pain. My vision returned, blurred with agony. He stood over me, smoke streaming from his eyes, mouth radiating red from the magma heat inside him.

Blue light reflected from the polished floor, that glow coming out of me, and I was helpless, unable to strike with it, unable to comprehend how. My frustration imploded into the purest rage I’ve ever felt. I came roaring up, seizing the leg of the lamp table as I rose. The lamp shattered on the floor as I swung the table at my father’s head. The blow connected, the impact jarring my elbow, wrenching my shoulder; then the table exploded in a burst of fire.

The force threw me against a wall. I felt a hundred splinters embed themselves. I screamed. A stack of storage crates collapsed on top of me, their weight crushing the air out of my lungs. Humpty’s idiot smile leered at me, his torn-up remains spilled from one of the boxes.

I grasped one of his long cloth arms.

My father loomed over me, grinning, gloating. He opened his mouth to breathe. I hooked his ankle with mine, and sent him sprawling. He grunted like a boar when he landed. I sprang on him before he could recover, and wrapped Humpty’s arm around his throat.

He drew in breath to blast me, but I twisted my arm-tourniquet tighter. He thrashed, his face purpling. The smoke from his eyes fizzled to nothing, leaving empty sockets.

Humpty’s arm twitched in my grip.

I cried out, jumped back. Instead of releasing, the arm began to tighten of its own accord.

My father’s face withered like paper set aflame. First smoke rose from his chest, then flickers of combustion, then a roaring fire. I scrambled to find a door, but I couldn’t see for the smoke. The soot from my father’s pyre filled my lungs, and the chaos of the scene drifted away.

* * *

“Well, brother, I have to thank you.” Humpty sat on my chest, whole again, his ruptured stitches repaired with shimmering threads of ethereal yellow, that essence I’d seen my father swallow so long ago. “You’re free now. We’re both free now.”

We were back in my bedroom—or was it Melissa’s? Mine, I decided. “You. You were my father’s familiar. His magic totem. His power source.” A vast shape squatted on the bed, something hunched and multilimbed and only vaguely humanoid, formed of nothing more than pinpricks of darkness. Its convoluted anatomy corresponded with the doll’s in only one place—the wide, glass-filled mouth.

“So you can see me. What I really am. You could never do that before.” I felt the combined weight of his two forms squeezing out my breath. “I never enjoyed being owned. Your father was strong, as you are strong. You would not believe what I went through, to sneak a way out of your private hell, to bring you in. Now we can both leave.”

“Get off me. Please.”

“Your innocence has always been so delectable. I’ve always known that if I could claim your strength I could escape. But under your father’s iron fist I was too weak. No more. No weakness now.”

He began his four-limbed spider crawl toward me. The vast black shape shifted above me. I tried to throw him off, but he was too heavy.

His teeth closed around my face.

* * *

I awaken in Melissa’s apartment. Mine, as well—we live together. I hear her breath rasping beside me. Her face, round and beautiful, is rendered ghoulish in the green illumination. The greenish glow is emanating from me.

I get up, go to the sliding doors that lead to the balcony, stare at my reflection in the glass. Green embers smolder in one hollow eye-socket. My own idiot smile flashes back at me.

A great form composed of darkness looms behind me, the pitch black of its presence matched only by the abyss of hunger that yawns inside me, that causes me to turn to my sleeping partner with a new appreciation for her innocence.