Read The Suburb Beyond the Stars Online
Authors: M. T. Anderson
The Suburb Beyond the Stars (8 page)
T
here was no use hiding in the closet. Gregory and Brian sheepishly stepped out.
The man set down his briefcase and held out his hand to shake. As he did, he introduced himself. “Milton Deatley. Real estate developer. Super to meet you.”
Brian didn’t move. The man grabbed his hand and shook it. “I know,” said Deatley. “Brian Thatz. It’s a pleasure. I’ve seen you before. From a distance. We apparently share a commute.”
Deatley looked at Brian’s friend. “Gregory Stoffle?” Deatley guessed.
“You’re dead,” said Gregory.
“And you’re rude,” said the corpse of Milton Deatley. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pamphlet that had been reproduced on a cheap color printer. “Here you go.” He handed it to Brian and turned away.
It was a piece of paper folded into three. The title was on the cover flap.
What Humans Need to Know About an Invasion of the Thusser Horde.
“What is this?” Brian whispered.
The corpse of Milton Deatley did not answer. He put his briefcase on the bed and opened it. There were no papers inside, only raw meat.
“Where’s my cousin?” Gregory demanded.
“It’s all in there,” said Deatley, pointing vaguely toward the pamphlet before turning his attention away from the boys.
The corpse reached into his briefcase and pulled out a handful of meat. He walked over to the boy in the bedroom wall, stuck his fingers into the boy’s half-glimpsed mouth, and pried it open. He roughly arranged the tongue. He shoved in meat, then manipulated the lower jaw to force it to chew. Beneath the lumpy chin, the wall puckered and smoothed.
“What are you … doing?” Gregory protested in horror. Deatley didn’t even look at him. He fed the kid another mouthful of meat.
Brian opened the pamphlet and began to read.
As a human, you might be asking questions about the Thusser settlement of your world. You might be asking, “But what does this mean for
me
?” The answer is almost total annihilation. This pamphlet is designed to put your mind at rest by answering some commonly asked questions about the settlement and what will follow.
What’s Going On?
You may feel confused or concerned about changes that have been going on in your neighborhood. That’s perfectly natural. The fabric of your world is becoming increasingly thin as we prepare your region for settlement. Time has stopped working as it usually does. The cycle of days is different as we accommodate your world to our own very different chronological landscape. Soon, all will be prepared, and the Thusser will enter this world and take possession of the houses we are constructing here. And these three square miles are only the beginning.
Brian felt a chill of horror at the friendly, informative tone of the pamphlet. He looked up at the corpse of Milton Deatley. Deatley picked up another handful of meat and walked over to the girl who hung out of the wall. With the heel of his other hand, he shoved the girl’s forehead up. Her mouth hung open. He crammed it full of meat and forced her to chew.
Brian and Gregory read on in the nightmare brochure.
Can my friends, my family, and I escape before you arrive?
Unfortunately, that’s not possible. Because if you’ve gotten this pamphlet — well, we’ve arrived! Many of your friends and family members have probably already been absorbed by their houses. We can’t let them go. They’re part of the preparation. They’re part of the neighborhood — a neighborhood, after
all,
is
people! We need them. We need their spirits, their dreams. That is part of the atmosphere we breathe. They are what we build our foundations on. They are the dirt into which we pound our tent pegs. We cannot remain in this world without one foot in the dreams of humanity. So each house will have its slumbering humans. After a while, they’ll stop dreaming entirely. They’ll just be appliances like any other. By that time, the settlement will have spread across North America. There are millions of us waiting to come through. In fact, we’ve been waiting for centuries!
But that means you’re breaking the Rules! You’re moving into Norumbegan territory!
Yes, that’s true. The Norumbegans are too far away to care. They have their own concerns. They can hardly remember this place. They’ll never notice if we move in. Why should we consent to their silly Game when the territory is ripe for the taking? The Thusser Horde needs a place to settle. There’s demand. So we’re going to move in. It will happen in about three days.
“Where’s my cousin?” Gregory demanded.
Brian asked, “Has she been swallowed by her house? Is she in the walls like that?”
“It’s all in the brochure,” said Deatley. The girl’s teeth clacked together as he forced her to chew, then massaged her throat so she’d swallow. “Read.”
Brian and Gregory looked down. Indeed, the next question was,
You may be wondering: Where’s my cousin?
We like to accommodate our clients here at Rumbling Elk Haven. Your cousin Prudence owned a piece of land right in the middle of our neighborhood, unfortunately. The owners of the units around her thought she might stir up trouble. And we realized she wouldn’t harmonize well with our community. So we had her removed.
Has she been absorbed by her house? Is she in the walls?
No. She wasn’t willing to be part of what we’re trying to do here. She was not a team player. She has been sequestered and is being reworked to ease her transition into the neighborhood.
Gregory went and stood directly in front of the corpse. He shouted, “Where? Where is she?”
The corpse didn’t blink. It was, perhaps, incapable of blinking. “I’ll take you there, if you like,” he said.
“Right now,” Gregory insisted.
Deatley stared him down. “You’ll never see the light of day again. Think about what you ask for.”
Brian said, “You tried to kill me.”
Milton Deatley shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought you might warn the Norumbegans.
Luckily, it appears you don’t know how.” Deatley kept kneading the girl’s chin to get her to chew. The meat flecked her lips. “Much more convenient that way. The Norumbegans won’t be tipped off until we’ve already arrived. By then, it will be too late.”
“Don’t say
we,”
said Gregory, defiantly. “You’re just a human, too. And not even a live human. A dead human.”
Deatley did not respond. He shook his head and wiped his fatty, bloody hand on his pants. He took out a pocket package of Kleenex and plucked one loose. He scrubbed his fingers with it.
Brian saw the pamphlet rearranging itself, the constant fluttering of language on the page.
You are dead. You are human.
This body, yes, is a reconstituted human. I have been rebuilt from the remains of Milton Deatley, deceased. But I am one of the Thusser. I am sitting in a pod, gesturing so this puppet dances on its strings. It was impossible to send in one of the Thusser bodily without setting off alarms. And we needed a human avatar who could make preparations, purchasing the land according to the economic rites of your people. We are an orderly invader. We needed a representative to appear before the zoning board and the town selectmen. For that purpose, we gathered together the pieces of Mr. Deatley and supplied some gobbets to make up the difference. So I only appear to be a real estate developer.
I am terrified. I am clutching this brochure, and it creases in my hands as I stand before you. You do not seem to even pay me heed as you go about your business. I do not know what to do when faced by the enormity of your invasion.
Stop worrying! Calm down. Really! There’s nothing you can do. We are an infinitely more ancient race than yours, and infinitely wiser. As I speak to you, as I arrange this helpful and informative pamphlet, it is like a kindly human talking to a dog. My signal is infinitely rich. You can’t even detect, much less participate in, the excess, all the nuances and extensions to what I’m saying that are at the moment reverberating in this room and rippling through this sheet of paper. A dog can only hear “sit,” “lie down,” and “walkies.” [There was, at this point, full-color clip art of a dog wagging its tail, tongue out.] As you read this, you feel a strange unease — it seems like the ink itself crawls and betrays you — because on some level you are aware that there are many meanings — things unspoken, hieroglyphics in thought. Many are swimming past you, and you are unable to assimilate them. Many more manifest themselves on this page in response to your animal anxieties. I am sorry I cannot make this clearer. You may explain to a dog why you are taking it to the vet for shots, but it will still look at you accusingly when the needle goes in.
So you’re saying that if we could only understand it, we’d realize this is good for us?
I haven’t said anything of the kind. It will essentially obliterate millions of human animals. They will be nothing more than slumbering bundles.
But the Rules
There are no Rules anymore. Your race likes to function under general agreements. That is necessary because you are all essentially at the same level. But when there is a race far superior to humankind, there is no more need for Rules. There is only dominance.
You can’t do this. You have to — you have to go somewhere else. There are other worlds. The Norumbegans found one. You could go to another world and leave us alone.
But why would we? We want to come here.
But we’re here.
Why does that matter? You’re irrelevant to us. You don’t really count. The Thusser Horde wants this place as its own, and we will get it. You’re a race far inferior to us. You’re useful to us as stepping-stones. Your joy, your sorrows, don’t matter to us whatsoever.
You can’t even understand the depth of our emotion and how it exceeds yours. The infinitely nuanced melancholies, the bottomless griefs, the joys one of us feels at any given time are more various at once than all of
the symphonic pleasures of Rome or Manhattan Isle. Do not think we are a harsh race, unfeeling and terrible. We are a deeply compassionate people — far more than you can ever understand. You are simply not equipped to experience our superiority in this regard. Even as you read and I watch you, standing on the other side of the room with my arms folded, even as I decree your eventual fall and explain its inevitability, I am at the same moment involved in sorrow at your passing as a race and nostalgia for the days of your ascendancy. We plan on including a mural in the community center that recalls humankind and its little joys — going berry picking, hailing buses, excreting, riding the surf on belly boards. All the quaint little behaviors that the Thusser associate with mankind.
The animated corpse of Milton Deatley stood, indeed, with his arms crossed, watching them read, watching the fear grow on their faces.
“But,” protested Brian, “you must be able to settle on another world! A different one! It just doesn’t make sense!”
“Why? There’s this one. We like it. We want it.” Milton Deatley threw his dirty Kleenex on the floor, closed his briefcase, and snapped its locks shut. Then he smiled at the two boys. “Anyhoo,” he said, “there will be time enough for remorse later. I have mouths to feed. A few more days and they won’t need to eat anymore. They will have been completely absorbed. As for you, how about this: You have until nightfall to leave. Go back to Boston.
It won’t be absorbed for another year or two.” He prepared to go. “Remember: Out by nightfall. Or we kill you outright.” He grinned. “Okay? I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you really are irrelevant to our effort. Nightfall. That’s it. And don’t think of warning anyone. It’s already too late. Far too late.”
He strode out of the room. “Have a great day,” he called as he headed down the stairs, leaving Gregory and Brian appalled and alone.
The pamphlet was now blank.
For a while, Brian and Gregory couldn’t speak. Brian was biting his own lips and staring at the boy in the wall. Gregory sagged on the bed, elbows on his knees, as if all comedy had drained out of him forever. He couldn’t look at Brian. To look at Brian would mean he’d have to speak, and Brian would have to speak, and together, they’d have to acknowledge that this was the world they lived in. They would have to start doing something.
Brian got up and went to the girl’s side. He examined the slashes in the wallboard. He could not see her legs behind the slashes. It was like she went no farther than the wall itself.
Brian pulled at her arm. She swayed forward. Her head rocked. She didn’t respond otherwise. Brian tugged harder. He tried to pull her out of the wall. He said to Gregory, “Come see if we can yank her out.”
Gregory didn’t get up. He looked at Brian once, accusingly, then dropped his gaze to the white rug. They had tracked in mud. It was easy to see how dead Deatley had found them in the closet. Their footprints led right to it.
Brian still pulled at the girl. The wall around her midriff buckled, but more like flesh might.
“Everyone will be like that,” said Gregory. “Everyone. Your mom and dad. My mom and dad. Imagine whole streets like this. As far as you can see. People fading into their walls. Or that guy downstairs, trying to fade into his floor. No one talking. No one —”
“I know,” said Brian. “I know.”
“Well, then stop pulling on that stupid wall girl.”
“We need to figure out how to save them.”
“You’re not going to figure it out from just yanking on her arm.”
“I might.”
“You won’t be —”
But he didn’t finish what he was saying.
From downstairs — a tremendous roar — a scream — the man in the floor, squealing,
“MONSTER!”
Something was sprinting across the foyer.
Something was bounding up the steps, three at a time.