Surfing the Gnarl (5 page)

A cracked trumpet note sounded from the heavens, then another and another. “Look,” said Gretchen pointing up. “It's all true.”

“God help us,” said Tonel, gazing at the gathering UFOs.

A silver torus landed by the clubhouse, homing right in on the eighteenth green. Some creatures got out, things more or less like large praying mantises—with long, jointed legs, curving abdomens, bulging compound eyes,
and mouths that were cruel triangular beaks. A dozen of them. They headed straight for the barbeque wagon.

Stacked on the table beside the barbeque wagon were the headless butchered corpses of Lulu Anders, Louie Levy, Lucy Candler, and Rick Stazanik, ready to be cooked. The aliens—or devils—crossed the terrace, their large bodies rocking from side to side, their green abdomens wobbling. Danny swung up the barbeque wagon's curved door. There in the double-hog barbeque grill were the bodies of Les and Ragland, already well crisped.

Sweating and grinning, Danny wielded a cleaver and a three-tined fork, cutting loose some tender barbeque for the giant mantises. The monsters bit into the meat, their jaws snipping out neat triangles.

Danny's eyes were damned, tormented, mad. He was wearing something strange on his head, not a chef's hat, no, it was floppy and bloody and hairy and with big ears— it was poor Les Trucklee's scalp. Danny was a Pig Chef.

Over by the parking lot, early-bird golfers and barbeque breakfasters were starting to arrive. One by one the mibracc beat them to death with golf clubs and dragged them to the barbeque wagon's side. Even with the oily smoke and the smell of fresh blood in the air, none of the new arrivals thought to worry when the five familiar men from the back room approached them.

“The end of the world,” breathed Gretchen.

“I have to see Mom,” said Jack brokenly. “Get my suitcase and see Mom. I have to leave today.”

“I want to get Daddy,” said Tonel.

The three looped around the far side of the clubhouse and managed to hail down a pickup truck with a lawnmower in back. The driver was old Luke Taylor.

”Can you carry us home?” asked Tonel.

“I can,” said Luke, dignified and calm. “What up at the country club?”

“There's a flying saucer with devils eating people!” said Gretchen. “It's the end!”

Luke glanced over at her, not believing what he heard. “Maybe,” he said equably, “But I'm still gonna cut Mrs. Bowen's grass befo' the sun gets too hot.”

Luke dropped them at Vaughan Electronics. Jack and Gretchen ran around the corner to the rectory. The house was quiet, with the faint chatter of children's voices from the back yard. Odd for a Sunday morning. Rev. Langhorne should be bustling around getting ready for church. Jack used his key to open the door, making as little noise as possible. Gretchen was right at his side.

It was Gretchen who noticed the spot on the banister. A dried bloody print from a very small hand. Out in the backyard the children were singing. They were busy with something; Jack heard a clank and a rattle. He didn't dare go back there to see.

Moving fast, Jack and Gretchen tiptoed upstairs. There was blood on the walls near the Langhorne parents' room. Jack went straight for his mother's single bedroom, blessedly unspotted with blood. But the room was empty.

“Mom?” whispered Jack.

There was a slight noise from the closet.

Jack swung open the closet door. No sign of his mother—but, wait, there was a big lump on the top shelf, covered over with a silk scarf.

“Is that you, Mom?” said Jack, scared what he might find.

The paisley scarf slid down. Jack's mother was curled
up on the shelf in her nightgown, her eyes wide and staring.

“Those horrible children,” she said in a tiny, strained voice. “They butchered their parents in bed. I hid.”

“Hurry, Mrs. Vaughan,” said Gretchen. She was standing against the wall, peeking out the back window. “They're starting up the grill.”

And, yes, Jack could smell the lighter fluid and the smoke. Four little Pig Chefs in the making. A smallish alien craft slid past the window, wedging itself down into the backyard.

Somewhat obsessively, Jack went into his bedroom and fetched his packed suitcase before leading Gretchen and his Mom to the front door. It just about cost them too much time. For as the three of them crept down the front porch steps they heard the slamming of the house's back door and the drumming of little footsteps.

Faster than it takes to tell it, Jack, Gretchen, and Jessie Vaughan were in Jessie's car, Jack at the wheel, slewing around the corner. They slowed only to pick up Tonel and Vincente, and then they were barreling out of town on Route 501.

“Albert was saying we should come to the Casa Linda and help him,” said Gretchen. “He said he'd be watching from the roof. He said he needed five pure hearts to pray with him. Six of us in all. We're pure, aren't we?”

Jack might not have stopped, but as it happened, there was a roadblock in the highway right by the Casa Linda. The police all had pointed ears. The coffee in their cups was continually swirling. And the barbeque pit beside the Banana Split was fired up. A gold UFO was just now angling down for a landing.

“I'm purely ready to pray my ass off,” said Vincente.

When they jumped out of the car, the police tried to take hold of the five, to hustle them toward the barbeque. But a sudden flight of the little angels distracted the pig-eared cops. The tiny winged beings beat at the men's cruel faces, giving the five pure hearts a chance.

Clutching his suitcase like a talisman, Jack led Gretchen, Jessie, Tonel, and Vincente across the parking lot to the Casa Linda. They pounded up the motel's outdoor concrete stairs, all the way to the roof. The pointy-eared police were too busy with the next carload of victims to chase after them. Over by the Banana Split, hungry mantises were debarking from the gold donut.

They found Albert Chesney at the low parapet of the motel roof, staring out across the rolling hills of Killeville. He had a calm, satisfied expression. His prophecies were coming true.

“Behold the city of sin,” he said, gesturing toward Killeville's pitifully sparse town center, its half dozen worn old office buildings. “See how the mighty have been brought low.”

“How do we make it stop, Albert?” asked Gretchen.

“Let us join hands and pray,” said Chesney.

So they stood there, the early morning breeze playing upon the six of them—Albert, Gretchen, Jack, Jessie, Tonel, and Vincente. There were maybe three dozen toroidal UFOs scattered around Killeville by now. And beside each of them was a plume of greasy smoke.

Jack hadn't prayed in quite some time. As boarders in the rectory, they'd had to go to Reverend Langhorne's church every Sunday, but the activity had struck him as exclusively social, with no connection to any of the deep philosophical and religious questions he might chew over
with friends, like, “Where did all this come from?” or, “What happens after I die?”

But now, oh yes, he was praying. And it's safe to say the five others were praying too. Something like, “Save us, save the earth, make the aliens go away, dear God please help.”

As they prayed, the mothlike angels got bigger. The prayers were pumping energy into the good side of the Shekinah Glory. Before long the angels were the size of people. They were more numerous than Jack had initially realized.

“Halle-friggin-lujah!” said Vincente, and they prayed some more.

The angels grew to the size of cars, to the size of buildings. The Satanic flying donuts sprang into the air and fired energy bolts at them. The angels grew yet taller, as high as the sky. Their faces were clear, solemn, terrible to behold. The evil UFOs were helpless against them, puny as gnats. Peeking through his fingers, Jack saw one of the alien craft go flying across the horizon toward an angel, and saw the impact as the great holy being struck with a hand the size of a farm. The shattered bits of the UFO shrank into nothingness, as if melting in the sun. It was only a matter of minutes until the battle was done. The closest angel fixed Jack with an unbearable gaze, then made a gesture that might have been a benediction. And now the great beings rotated in some unseen direction and angled out of view.

“Praise God!” said Albert Chesney when it was done.

“Praise God,” echoed Jack. “But that's enough for now, Lord. Don't have the whole Last Judgment today. Let me go to college first. Give us at least six more years.”

And it was so.

A Greyhound bus drew even with the Casa Linda and pulled over for a stop. B
LACKSBURG,
read the sign above the bus window. Jack bid the quickest of farewells to his mother and his friends, and then, whooping and yelling, he ran down the stairs with his suitcase and hopped aboard.

The Killeville Barbeque Massacre trials dragged on through the fall. Jack and Albert had to testify a few times. Most of the Pig Chef defendants got off with temporary insanity pleas, basing their defense on smeel-poi-soning, although no remaining samples of smeel could be found. The police officers were of course pardoned, and Danny Dank got the death penalty. The cases of Banks, Price, Sydnor, and Rainey were moot—for with their appetites whetted by the flesh of the children's parents, the mantises had gone ahead and eaten the four fledgling Pig Chefs.

The trials didn't draw as much publicity as one might have expected. The crimes were simply too disgusting. And the Killeville citizenry had collective amnesia regarding the UFOs. Some of the Day Six Synodites remembered, but the Synod was soon split into squabbling subsects by a series of schisms. With his onerous parole conditions removed in return for his help with the trials, Albert Chesney left town for California to become a computer game developer.

Jessie Vaughan got herself ordained as a deacon and took over the pastoral duties at St. Anselm's church. At Christmas Jessie celebrated the marriage of Jack to Gretchen Karst—who was indeed pregnant. Tonel took leave from the Navy to serve as best man.

Gretchen transferred into Virginia Polytechnic with Jack for the spring term. The couple did well in their studies. Jack majored in Fluid Engineering and Gretchen in Computer Science. And after graduation they somehow ended up moving into the rectory with Jessie and opening a consulting firm in Killeville.

As for the men in the back room of the country club—they completely dropped out of sight. The prudent reader would be well advised to keep an eye out for mi-bracc in his or her hometown. And pay close attention to the fluid dynamics of coffee, juice, and alcoholic beverages. Any undue rotation could be a sign of smeel.

The end is near.

For the years 1980-1986, I lived with my wife and kids in Lynchburg, Virginia, the home of televangelist Jerry Falwell and headquarters of his right-wing Moral Majority political action group. I ended up writing a number of stories about Lynchburg, transreally dubbing it Killeville.

During our final years in Lynchburg, I was proud to be a member of the Oakwood Country Club—it was a pleasant place and the dues were modest enough that even an unemployed cyberpunk writer could afford them. I was always intrigued by a group of men who sat drinking bourbon and playing cards in a small windowless room off the men's locker room—isolated from the civilizing force of the fair sex. Somehow I formulated the idea that at night the men were rolled up like apricot leather and stored in glass carboys of whiskey that sat within their golf bags.

I was thinking of a power-chord story somewhat analogous to Phil Dick's “The Father Thing.” The power chord here is “alien-controlled pod people.” Another archetype I wanted to touch upon is the Pig Chef, an icon that's always disturbed me. I wanted to push this concept to its logical conclusion, so that everyone would finally understand the Pig Chef's truly evil nature! Yet another aspect of my story is that I wanted to use the format of the classic last-night-of-high-school epic,
American Graffiti.

Despite all my pontificating about the virtues of logic in my interview with Terry Bisson in these pages, “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club” is pretty much at the surreal end of the spectrum, as is often the case with horror-tinged tales. Naturally I had trouble getting anyone to publish it. Fortunately, the writer and editor Eileen Gunn gets my sense of humor. Like my earlier story “Jenna and Me,” this weird tale found a home in Eileen's online magazine
Infinite Matrix
at
www.infinitematrix.net
, which was, as long as it lasted, something like a clear channel border-radio station.

I
USE
gnarl
IN AN IDIOSYNCRATIC
and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness.

The original meaning of “gnarl” was simply “a knot in the wood of a tree.” In California surfer slang, “gnarly” came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.

Do note that “gnarly” can also mean “disgusting.” Soon after I moved to California in 1986, I was at an art festival where a caterer was roasting a huge whole pig on a spit above a gas-fired grill the size of a car. Two teenage boys walked by and looked silently at the pig. Finally one of them observed, “Gnarly, dude.” In the same vein, my son has been heard to say, “Never ever eat anything gnarly.” And having your body become old and gnarled isn't necessarily a pleasant thing. But here I only want to talk about gnarl in a good kind of way.

Clouds, fire, and water are gnarly in the sense of being beautifully intricate, with purposeful-looking but not quite comprehensible patterns. And of course all living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected. As I mentioned, the shapes of tree branches are the standard example of gnarl. The life cycle of a jellyfish is way gnarly. The wild three-dimensional paths that a hummingbird sweeps out are kind of gnarly too, and, if the truth be told, your ears are gnarly as well.