400 Boys and 50 More (71 page)

The Kutzwoods rushed toward the intruder, but the faintly seedy figure in dirty white raised one hand and they recoiled as if burned with a flamethrower. Janet said, "Phil!"

"Get out of my house!" he intoned. "Get out, all of you. You bunch of quacks and crackpots! Charlatans!"

"Valis moves among us!" Sherwood cried. "He comes in human form!"

"I said clear out, you fucking windbag!" Phil stepped in, his beer gut hanging out between his flapping t-shirt and his bleach-stained whitish flares.

"Valis isn't in here," he said sourly, "but I can call it. This is the work of the demiurge—this is evil, illusion. Sucking this boy's life out of him. Fucking him full of death. It's my house and I want you all out of it right now, before I summon Valis through that snapping turtle and sic him on you. Catch a few snaps of that beak and I'll bet you won't be so eager to feel Valis."

When even after all this, no one moved to obey him, Phil stepped fully into the room and aimed a kick that Morris irrationally feared was meant for his head. He flinched, but Phil's toe merely shattered the pink bulb, and as it popped Morris jerked upright, and staggered for the exit, the plastic beads dragging over his face. The others were behind him, fleeing in a rush, and looking back into the room he saw a huge, an inconceivable shape seemed to mushroom into existence in the center of the room, beyond the beaded curtain, striking the Kutzwoods full of a revealing pink irradiation, their skeletons standing side by side, one short and squat, the other tall and angular. And as the light died they came staggering out as if blind, clutching at each other's hands, and followed the rest of their followers out the front door, sandals and bare feet slapping away on the weedy path.

Morris sat in a corner of the room, where he had fallen, his hand on the stack of Philip K. Dick novels. And then Philip K. Dick himself came out of the room and gave him a concerned look.

"Assholes," Phil said. "I would like to have messed with their heads a little bit longer, though."

"You—you're really here?"

"Sure," Phil said. "Aren't you?" "I'm—-" He was about to answer affirmatively, but a wave of something negative swept through him. All his fear came flooding out of him, then. It dawned on him suddenly where he was, and what was happening to him, and his surroundings sprang into awful clarity—so bright that he could barely look around himself.

"Take these," Phil said. He took a pillbottle out of his pants pocket and emptied it into his palm. There were pills of all sizes and shapes, all colors. He sorted through until he had picked out a yellow capsule, a golden gelatinous globes, a red ones and a green one. Some of the pills had the names of pharmaceutical companies on them, number codes, but these were all blank.

"Relax, they're vitamins. I've been experimenting with megadoses, and I think this combination will do you good. I'm not exactly sure what they dosed you with, but this can't hurt."

Morris swallowed them dry, and soon the surfaces of things began to cling more firmly to the objects which they normally covered; the edges of reality were all tacked back in place. Phil ghosted around the house, muttering to himself at the state of the place, waiting for Morris to settle. He brewed coffee and washed cups and finally came down and handed Morris a mug, and sat opposite him and gave him a wink.

"How did you know to come?" Morris asked.

Phil opened his hand. In it was a pink pill. "This," he said, "is Can-D." He popped it in his mouth.

Morris spilled out his story, as much of it made sense to him. Phil listened, and when he was finished, he began to speak, just weaving stories about the demiurge who had created this world, and how humanity was trapped in a false creation far below the notice of the demiurge's own creator—except that Valis moved among them, with messages of hope, with practical methods of transcendence, ways of unknotting the hopelessly tangled strands of reality and following them to. . .to what? Morris could not follow a fraction of it; he only lay there, letting the voice speak on, while he dodged in and out of consciousness. Toward morning, Phil rose and gestured him to his feet, and they set out under the paling skies, past quiet houses and trim green lawns marked inexplicably with Clorox bottles like squat little sentries beneath the camellia hedges. Phil brought him to the BART station and showed him how to buy his ticket, which train to take to the Oakland Airport. He turned from the turnstile after feeding his ticket through, turned to thank Phil, but he was already gone.

* * *

“To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat” copyright 1996 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared at
Dark Carnival Online
, February 1996, edited by Paul McEnery.

NETHER REACHES

To our right, the Reaches fell away into bottomless blackness. We struggled down a narrow trail, hugging close to the rock, every hundred yards or so coming upon the mouths of inner caves that coiled away where our lights could not penetrate. We hurried past, feeling the exhalations of dry air from deeper galleries, no one wishing to linger on those thresholds despite the escape they offered from the brink.

I began to imagine that down in the valley of blackness, luminous shapes stirred and swam. These may have been afterimages of lamplight and my companions' faces, or the random firing of sensors in my optic nerve; but that knowledge, uncertain at best, did nothing to reassure me when I began to imagine huge blind eyes floating up like helium balloons from between imaginary grey-glowing peaks deep in the abyss.

My fear, in fact my very behavior, became childlike. Not since childhood had I felt any such terror of the dark. It was nothing I had ever imagined facing again, not as an adult, an experienced explorer among others of equal skill. It took me by surprise, nor was I reassured to discover I was not the only one.

Katherine was the first to speak of it. Ward had begged a halt some three hours into our descent. We squatted down on the trail carved unknown ages before, and untouched for millenia— until recently. Still tethered together, we shared water and food. As I offered the canteen to Katherine, I noticed her gaze fixed not on the abyss, the sight of which I also kept avoiding, but on the unbroken ceiling of darkness above us.

“Can’t see it anymore,” she said.

I knew she meant the outer threshhold, which for a time had hung behind us like a dim grey star, visible only in contrast to such utter blackness. Now it was long gone, and except for the light we carried, or could generate, there would be no more until we reached the camp. I squeezed her shoulder. Like me she was covered with perspiration despite the chill of the Reaches. Mine was an icy, unpleasant sweat, like that which one feels when rising from a nightmare.

“Why am I so frightened?” she said.

Justin, a veteran of the Reaches, laughed. “Afraid of the dark?”

“There’s just so much of it,” she answered, unashamed. “No stars. . .nothing.”

“Try turning off all the lights,” he said. “Then you’ll really feel it. It’s a good idea to let yourself get used to it. “

“That’ll happen soon enough,” said Beth, our leader.

“Really,” said Ward, who like Katherine and myself was making his first trek into the cavern. “I’m in no hurry. It’s claustrophobic enough already.”

“Claustrophobic?” I said. “There’s nothing but open space.”

“But the blackness feels solid. As if, if we didn’t have lights, it would completely crush us.”

“Jesus, don’t say that!” said Katherine, rising. “You’re really scaring me now.”

“Relax,” I whispered, trying to pull her down next to me.

It made me nervous when she moved so near the edge of the trail. But my own reaction, though I kept it to myself, was the opposite of Ward’s. I felt as if I were expanding outward infinitely, sending my mind into the Reaches, to touch their limits, to fill the entire interior tracts of the icy cave-riddled planet.

“You’re like a bunch of kids around a campfire,” Beth said. “Come on, we’re not doing any good sitting here scaring each other. We’ve a long way to go before. . .”

Katherine laughed, forcing it. “Before what? Nightfall?”

“Before we can stop,” Beth finished. She was already striding away, forcing Justin to jump up before the cable could pull taut between them. Ward followed Justin, and I rose up reluctantly, clasping Katherine’s hand for a short moment.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “When we get to the catacombs, it’ll seem worthwhile.”

I didn’t understand her expression of doubt.

We had covered less than a third of our journey, as Beth indicated, but we were already near the end of the ridge route. Within a short time the trail broadened further. We pulled away from the brink of the abyss, still without any sight of its bottom, and moved first along the face of a sheer wall that rose to our left, then headed directly out across a broad stone plain whose surface undulated like the swells of a petrified sea, crazed with deep rifts. The narrower of these were spanned by rigid plastic ramps, still nearly brand-new, scuffed by very few boots. I grew a little bolder on the plain, because the fear of falling was gone, and I walked with ever lighter steps despite the occasional thought that I might be visible to anything peering down from above—though what I expected to be watching from the black heights above, I could never have named. I stabbed beams of light out into the surrounding plains, picking out heaps of stone, shattered scales that must have flaked and fallen from the cavern’s ceiling miles above. It seemed strange that the whole surface was not thickly littered with these piles, as if they had been swept up into tidy mounds over the eons, leaving all else clear. They reminded me disturbingly of enormous anthills, and after a time I stopped looking at them.

Justin fired a flare out into the dark; and while Beth cursed him for wasting it, the rest of us stood and watched it arc up and up and finally peak and fall, to land sputtering far out on the plain, somewhere beyond a jagged wall of stone scrapings. It made the silhouettes and shadows of those heaps twitch and shamble toward us. Dreadful illusions multiplied behind my eyes, and I felt an unlikely terror grow until I had to look away. The dull flare flickered for much longer than seemed right, and I glanced back at it repeatedly as we marched on.

Hours later, we saw another light ahead of us, first a dim suspicion, like a wishful mirage; but gradually it brightened. As we gained higher ground, we saw a raw spark of white fluorescence, stationary, with three smaller reddish sparks beneath it. It was the central beacon of the catacomb camp. As we grew closer, we saw the somewhat dimmer lamps mounted on shorter poles all around the site for constant illumination; and then we gradually made out the shapes of the camp shelters, tents and prefab huts, scattered pieces of machinery and vehicles, even a one-man pedal glider—all the necessities, as well as the detritus, of a three month occupation. The camp was staffed with nearly fifty people, yet none were visible as we approached.

Beth raised her radio, addressed the main station loudly, but received only static in reply.

Suddenly Katherine collapsed. I called to the others and sank down next to her to find her gasping, hyperventilating, full of repressed terror.

“Goddamn it, what now?” Beth said.

“She’s dizzy—she needs to rest.”

“Well stay with her then, unclip your line, we’re going on.”

“No!” Katherine said, struggling to pull herself upright. “I’ll be fine.”

“Have it your way.” Beth tried the radio again.

“Where are they?” Justin said.

“In the catacombs, where else?”

“All of them?”

We hurried to keep up, Katherine keeping one hand in mine, but we needn’t have worried about falling behind. Beth hadn’t gone fifty yards when suddenly she stopped short, cursing. At her feet was a rift much wider than any we had crossed thus far.

“Where’s the bridge?” Justin said.

Beth didn’t speak for a moment, watching the luminous screen of her hand-map. She shone her light left and right along the fissure, but there was nothing. Finally she aimed it straight down into the cleft, but I could tell without moving to the brink myself that she could see nothing down there.

“It was here,” she said.

“Hey, there’s someone,” Ward said, and he began to shout, waving in the direction of the camp. I looked toward the tents and sheds and at first saw nothing; then a figure pulled away from the shadow of one shelter and began to move across our view. Ward waved his lantern from side to side, the beam cleaving the air like a banner, until Justin struck his arm with a nervous cry and the lantern flew from Ward’s hand, striking the edge of the ravine and shattering before it rolled over into the darkness and began its plunge.

“Goddamn it “ Ward said.

“Shut up!” Beth cried, whirling on him, pushing us all back from the brink.

Somehow, I had kept my eyes on the figure between the tents until Beth got in my way. The last I saw, it was heading toward us, perhaps coming to help; but when I looked again there was no sign of it.

“What’s wrong?” Justin said desperately. “What’s happened?”

Beth turned her lantern down to its lowest setting, still herding us away from the edge. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. Put your lights out, all of you. We don’t want to attract attention.”

“Attention?” Ward said. “From who?”

“Just do it!” she hissed.

Katherine, trembling beside me, made a fearful sound as she switched hers off; then I did likewise. We needn’t have feared the coming of utter darkness, for the lights of the camp still towered on the far side of the fissure, bright enough to print our own shadows on the plain. The five of us, Beth still leading, moved behind a small stone heap. We sat there without speaking at first. I gulped some water and wondered how frightened I should be, and of what.

“We have to go back,” Justin said.

“Maybe. But not yet,” said Beth. “We’re not sure it’s anything.”

“But the radio, the bridge. . ..”

“You’re inferring too much, and you’re in a paranoid state of mind. There’s no evidence of. . .of anything.”