Lizard World (17 page)

Chapter VI.

A very troubling chapter, in which the Dentist finds himself at the core of the Big Apple and gradually awakens to the horrors of his plight.

After an
eternity of nightmares, Smedlow awoke to perfect blackness -- and at once the sewage of unpleasant memories came flooding back. He remembered, much too well, that half-human creature in the basement and Darrell’s shrieking death -- then his own escape, his frantic splashing through the swamp, and the humiliating failure of recapture. But then hazier and even more disturbing recollections came to mind: that monster woman with the needle -- the bags of blood, the gleaming scalpels on the table, and Lem -- that malicious nitwit -- snipping at his hair and shaving off the stubble on his scalp. Hideous memories: but at least they proved that, whatever else his captors had accomplished, they hadn’t injured his capacity to think.

      
This perfect blackness, however, could neither be probed nor explained away by cogitation. They had blindfolded him before, of course, and it was possible that they had blindfolded him again -- and left him in a very dark room. This obvious theory, which gave him some comfort for a very few moments, was exploded by the grim discovery that he could not feel his eyelids. A panicked inspection of other outposts of his sense of touch -- in the tip of his tongue, his fingers, his toes and, oh God, yes, even in his groin -- revealed that not one of his old soldiers was on duty. That did not necessarily mean, he now told himself, that these precious parts of his body had been removed -- only that he could no longer feel them.

      
But then a rollcall of his other senses -- hearing, smell and taste -- all proved equally disappointing. Only now, at the height of his terror, did he remember how that bitch’s injection had spread a total numbness through his limbs: yes, yes, that medicine was the most likely explanation. But then -- irresistibly insidious -- the sudden thought occurred to him that he might, instead, be dead.

      
This suspicion that he now was in his coffin grew stronger by the moment. But as the moments lengthened into hours, it was no longer merely a suspicion, but a certainty -- evident and suffocating. Why, for all he knew, there was already a headstone above him and a blanket of green sod and a crushing weight of rocks and mud -- and perhaps there would always only be this, this unspeakable boredom and this horror: a vast, black, eternal universe of Smedlow.

      
“Eeeeeeeee--uuuuuuuu! Eeeeeeeee--uuuuuuuu!”

      
What the hell was that?

      
“Eeeeeeeee--uuuuuuuu! Eeeeeeeee--uuuuuuuu!”

      
These shrill sounds, laughing and stabbing at him, now began a fickle game of sudden noise or silence, coming closer or retreating, then joining forces with a swirl of gaudy lights. If those old Tibetan monks were right, he told himself, then the demons of the third bardo had already started their attack. But then at last, ever so reluctantly and slowly, the sounds decided to behave themselves while the colored blur congealed into a vile, familiar shape.

      
“You don’t know what’s up, do you sucker?” said the shape.

      
Smedlow tried to speak, but found that the power lines that connected to his larynx had been cut. He could have sworn he’d heard that stupid Lem talking to him, but the words had sounded faint like an old-time long distance call, flickering on and off and crackling with the perversity of a bad connection. It was still quite possible, of course, that this muffled and brutal voice, this lank and ugly blur belonged to a more advanced species of hallucination. However, he couldn’t dismiss the nagging hunch that they were real. He counseled himself, as always, not to be drawn in by the seductive wiles of hope. Nonetheless, a tidal wave of relief and irrepressible, grateful euphoria rushed over him. No, thank God, Smedlow the indomitable was not dead. Why, now that these Neanderthals, these prognathous anthropoids, had finally had their fun with him, they might even let him go.

      
“You like surprises, cupcake?” said the voice.

      
A red-and-white Coca-Cola logo came slowly into focus; beside it a bottle of Coke was being downed by a lovely young flapper with bobbed blonde hair while, behind her and in the background, a handsome young frat boy in a racoon coat looked on with rapt and lascivious attention.

      
“Upsy-daisy,” said the voice. It was true that Smedlow couldn’t actually feel himself being lifted: but the Coke ad now scrolled quickly upward as the hanging straps, broken windows and graffittied benches of an abandoned subway car came bounding into view.

      
“Now, don’t you go nowhere, ace,” said the voice.

      
It did seem reasonable to conclude that he now was sitting on some kind of chair. However, since he could neither move his head on his neck nor sufficiently shift his eyes in their sockets to look downward, it was impossible to determine this with absolute certainty. Instead, the frame of his vision was limited to the far end of the subway car where a discolored mattress, a stove, a refrigerator and a rusted freezer speckled with wads of gum huddled in the gloom between the facing doors. Girlie pictures wallpapered the ceiling. Blocking the aisle between the benches a humongous snake, apparently a python, slumbered in a huge terrarium.

      
“
Well, I just bet you’d like a little peek, wouldn’t ya?” said the voice, which suddenly he could definitely identify since now he was looking directly at Lem’s lean and pockmarked face -- that scraggly mustache like a clump of misplaced pubic hair, those black eyes twitching with moronic depravity. But, just as suddenly, Lem’s face disappeared and, in its stead, a mirror was thrust before Smedlow’s eyes -- and then immediately retracted.

      
It had happened so very quickly that he really couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen. But his first thought was that he had never, ever, seen an older and more repulsive face: a mummy’s mask of wrinkles, flaking skin, bloodshot eyes and agespots. His second thought was that it could not possibly be his.

      
As if it were a giant lollipop, his captor held the mirror by its stem, coyly hiding its reflective surface on the frayed strap of his soiled T-shirt.

      
“Now I suppose you’re already hankerin’ for another peek, ain’t ya?” he said.
 

      
The golden backside of the mirror bore a small, enamelled, chipped, faded and almost indecipherable coat of arms. Smedlow, who was a sucker for antiquities, did his very best to make out the age-worn heraldry: a field sable, three rowels silver in a chief azure and a wyvern rampant vert over all.

      
“Well, maybe just one more itty-bitty peek -- real quick,” said his captor: and then, just as suddenly, the death’s-head in the mirror reappeared and vanished.

      
“You see how I’m always givin’ you every teeny thing yer heart desires? Didn’t I tell you I’m the only pal you got?”

      
Plastic surgery, thought Smedlow, grabbing for a lifeline in his panic: it simply must be plastic surgery.

      
“Yep,” continued Lem, “we’re such pals we’re like brothers now, ain’t we? That’s how come I’m gonna treat you to a big surprise.”

      
Smedlow now saw his captor brush past him, step over the calico snake in the terrarium, saunter down the aisle through the facing benches and come to a halt among the kitchen appliances and other junk crammed together at the far end of the subway car.
 

      
“You all ready now, pal?” he said. Then he swung the freezer open, revealing thick ice, frozen pizzas, hamburger patties, a pink-smeared box of strawberry ice cream and (occupying the bottom half of the compartment) a bulging large green garbage bag -- of the yellow-drawstringed variety which Smedlow preferred for lining the trash can in his kitchen back home or for gathering up a load of autumn leaves.

      
Although this garbage bag -- owing undoubtedly to its weight -- could not easily be coaxed from its ice-encrusted nest, Lem kept on tugging until finally he managed to yank it out -- and drag it close enough so that Smedlow could see a steak-red clump lurking in its drawstringed mouth.

      
“Just like Christmas, ain’t it?” said Lem, pulling the yellow bow and peeling down the bag to expose both the fore and hindquarters of the body: “Now ain’t that somethin’? Why, I bet you ain’t never before seen how damn big your keester was.”

      
Smedlow -- could he still call himself that? -- wanted desperately to scream, but again was blocked by the failure of his larynx. His own head, its top removed like the lid of a tuna fish can, lay gaping in the aisle before him. Ice crystals had formed on the raw meat of the forehead and in the carnage of the hollow cavity. The tongue slumped out between the teeth. The eyes -- his eyes -- stared blankly at a dustball on the floor.

      
A convulsion of horror and pity overtook him. There was the scar on his chin that he’d gotten when he’d been pushed off a seesaw. There were the thick shrubbery and broad bulb of his nose. Was this odd terror what astronauts felt when they saw the distant earth?
And why, why had he allowed himself to smoke so much and let his buttocks get so fat? In a sickening aftershock he noticed that they had tied him with electric cord into a fetal position and that his twilled slacks had been crunched up into a wad below his rump because something apparently was missing. Only then did he finally see that despite all this -- and without him -- his beard had kept right on growing, and this felt like an intimate betrayal.

      
“Well, pal,” said Lem at last, pulling the green bag up and tying it closed again, “I sure do hate to bring bad news, but it looks like you ain’t nothin’ now but just one more goddamn splicer.”

Chapter VII.

In which the Dentist takes a joyride.

With each
pothole, each sudden stop and each sharp curve, the bulging green bag kept sliding and slumping over on him, oozing reddish rivulets on the white backseat of the limousine and the mauve thigh of his linen trousers.
    

      
“Now are you boys behavin’ back there? You fellas better keep to yer own sides or I’m gonna have to spank yer heinies.”

      
It was just possible, Smedlow thought, that he might now, finally, be going mad. The only reasonable thing to do was to try -- try very, very hard -- to calm down and somehow stop looking at that loathsome bag. Yes, but he would also have to force himself to withstand this destructive, but irresistibly itching urge to look in the opposite direction: but, oh no, no -- he had already done it and was now once again staring at the pale, wrinkled, blotched and hairless old reflection which repulsively stared back at him from the darkness of the rainstreaked window.

      
But this time Smedlow didn’t look away. So far this atrocious, alien body had cleverly eluded his control -- except, that is, for the muscles which rolled the eyeballs and blinked the lids. And even these paltry muscles were extremely hard to locate, all too often slipping from his mental grasp and only forced to do his bidding by the most sustained and exhausting concentration.

      
“And do you really think you can so easily vanquish Max Nathan Smedlow?” thought Smedlow, challenging his revolting reflection, summoning his strength: and with two more sudden efforts he made the drooping eyelids in the window blink -- first left, then right. It was as if, from the depths of this new prison, he had managed to smuggle out a small secret message to himself.
“Max Smedlow is locked up inside of here,” this message said, “but he is still alive and very much capable of action.”

      
A horn honked. Brakes screeched -- and Smedlow was suddenly aware that his head had jolted forward so that he was looking at a gnarled talon on his lap. If a large brown spider had been placed before his eyes, he could not have been more horrified and disgusted. No, he could not, would not, ever think of this repulsive hand as his own. The nails themselves were bad enough, brown and thick and long. But those warped, thin fingers and that bony leather like an open fan: why, this was less a hand than the wing of a crippled pterodactyl. The gold ring, of course, was something else again: the setting was appallingly baroque, but that ruby was easily fifteen carats. -- Oh Good God, thought Smedlow, suddenly focused on his purple lap: those scrawny thighs -- why, they were little better than sticks! And what horrid, shriveled hose lurked beneath that fly he could only shudder to imagine.