Unholy Dimensions (30 page)

What would they think of the odd, Mayan-like tattoo Violet had copied from one of her books onto her belly, only last month? Vaguely East wondered what Mrs. LeBlanc must think of that strange spiraling design. Would she believe them both insane if he told her it was a doorway from which his wife would escape her poisoned flesh?

He rose from the desk. His dream had so unsettled him that he felt compelled to go look in on the tank...

The fluorescent lights of the barn came on with a hesitant flicker.

East was reassured to see things in order. He checked the tank for the tenth time that day. Inside its glass coffin, the culture was an oblong blob of pale dough. It didn’t breathe. It didn’t pulsate. But it was life, in its most primitive state. It awaited specialization. Transformation. It awaited the strong vision of the artist and her paints. If only there would be enough of Violet left to be that artist...

At least the mass wouldn’t fight her for dominion of its body. It had no consciousness, no sense of self; indeed, no self. It
awaited
self.

East wandered the barn, smoking a cigarette. He peered into the other tanks and containers.

There were other masses. Some tiny. A few in tanks as large as the one containing Violet’s clay. Some masses were larger. One of these was a huge mound, a white mountain of protoplasm, sitting in a puddle of solution in a child’s plastic swimming pool. As he passed, he stroked its slick, smooth flesh. In a few other pools were somewhat smaller masses. Other experiments. But these were also spare parts. If Violet couldn’t shape, sculpt, transform the designated lump of cells, maybe she could switch to another and try again. Or what if she did transform the mass, but it couldn’t sustain its integrity? She might need to constantly switch to a fresh vehicle.

He hoped his wife would not have to live in one of these tanks, sit forever in one of these pools. No...she wouldn’t have to. He mustn’t let his faith falter.

The spirit existed. Persisted. So many already believed that when the body died, the spirit went on its own. But why shouldn’t it have a new body to possess? One with no real life of its own to oust? A sort of reincarnation. Tibetan monks conjured up thought forms called
tulpas,
gave them life of their own. Why shouldn’t Violet conjure herself in this pliable stuff of life from which all life had originated in the first place?

East heard her calling for him in the house, sobbed as he stood smoking his cigarette amongst his hulking, idiot crop.

The pounding at the workshop door was, in East’s dream interpretation, the beat of a heart lurching violently to life. His ear was to his work bench as if to a cold chest listening for that throb. In his jolting awake he leapt to his feet, almost knocking back his chair. He rushed to the door, opened it to see the orange-pink of dawn glowing dimly around the head of Mrs. LeBlanc.

She was breathless. “Dr. East...I’m sorry. She’s gone...”

“Gone?” He gawked at her, disoriented.

“I’m not sure when it happened. I fell asleep in my chair. She’s very cold; it must have been a few hours ago, at least. I’m sorry, Dr. East, I’m so sorry. But it must have been peaceful, for me not to have heard anything...”

“Yes,” East said, snapping his head to look at his wall, racks and shelves cluttered with the paraphernalia of science and his books on the occult and mysticism. Beyond that wall was the barn interior. “Thank you, Mrs. LeBlanc. Please make the appropriate calls now, will you?”

“Yes, sir, um...I will. But...don’t you want to see her?”

“Not yet. Maybe later.”

The nurse’s eyes dropped to his fingers, gripping the door edge as if to burrow into the wood. In addition, the claw hand was humming with vibration. She said, “Yes, sir,” and walked back across the sparkling morning dew, crushing and killing countless minute and primitive organisms whose passing went unnoticed and unmourned.

He burst into the barn. Slants of pink-gold light were beaming through a few gaps in the high wood walls. A bar of this light lay across the giant mound of cells in its child’s pool, the rest of its flesh a cool shadowy blue. The tank was out of reach of the light, dark and obscure. Before going to it, East hit the lights...as if for the first time, the thought of seeing Violet lying in there naked, eyes open and waiting for him, terrified him. But even as he did so, he knew what he would see.

The dough was not bread The stone unchiseled. The canvas blank.

In its tank, the 140 pounds of tobacco plant wart slept serenely, dreamless.

How could he have ever believed? How had he ever deluded himself, found faith in his delusions?

The same way all those who dreamed of the spirit persisting, of heavens, deluded themselves. Out of denial, as Mrs. LeBlanc had said. Out of fear...

It all ended in the flesh. In the jail of the cells, without escape or chance of parole.

With a liberation of his full fury, with a long suppressed wail of loss and frustration, Carl East swept up a heavy spade from its nail in the barn wall and ran at the obese bathing mound first. The Lord of the Idiots. The Emperor of the Unknowing. Its flesh was slashed without bleeding under the thumping and whacking blows of the shovel. It didn’t seem to mind dying.

East was soaked in sweat and hoarse by the time he turned on the tank. It was the last target he’d saved, and he hesitated. He hesitated. But then he struck. The glass shattered, the nutrient solution gushed free like liquor amnii...but this fetus had never formed.

Mrs. LeBlanc heard his cries, and the smashing, but was too afraid to go see what he was doing. She’d rather remain with the corpse.

Her cold flesh had been taken away. East laughed at himself, wagging his head. He nearly tipped the glass of vodka reaching for it. Finally, with Violet gone, he sat in the house. Finally he had held her hand, just as they were ready to take her. Once again Mrs. LeBlanc had been right; he should have come to her while she was calling for him. Now it was too late. She was gone forever. Even Mrs. LeBlanc was gone. Night was a mantle on his house and on what he once would have called his soul.

She must have been calling out for him to tell him the truth she had realized toward the end. That there were not going to be any miracles. Only the mindless mind of Nature could shape primal matter – not the ingenuity or will of humans. Nature was pragmatic; maybe that was the key. With humans, passion hindered everything.

There was a loud crash from outside the house. From the barn.

East stiffened. It was surely something he had attacked with the shovel, toppling further. Or maybe raccoons or skunks had gotten in there, now that it was night; he remembered having left the barn doors wide, no longer concerned with secrecy.

But another sound came, and East knew that no raccoon or skunk would be smashing things so loudly...

He rose from the sofa. Vandals, maybe? Kids, having seen the barn open? He moved into the kitchen, shut off the lights and peeked around the lace in the back door window. The barn door gaped darkly. No ghostly flashlights in that cavern. He took up his own flashlight – and a short sword of a bread knife. Violet’s knife. She had been a wonderful cook. A gourmet. The foolish attention humans paid to such primitive functions as eating...and for what, in the end, all that effort, all that love? Only to lose it, only to die, only...

East hushed his babbling mind as he eased the back door open. The night was cool and still – poised. He stalked away from the house, feeling vulnerable away from it, under the yawning black sky. His ears strained ahead of him like dogs on leash, but he heard no further sounds coming from the...

“Carl...”

Oh, God.

East was spiked to his spot, transfixed from head to soles. It was Violet’s voice. The same mournful sob of a cry he had heard last night. But now it came from the barn.

Part of him leaped up inside, elated. Part of him wanted to spin and bolt for the house. Caught between these extremes, he swayed, a sob of fear or hope or confusion snagged in his throat.

“Caarrl,
”
the voice moaned. The voice was louder than it had been last night, and deeper. Oddly strong and resonant. Almost a rumble across the damp grass to him. But it was Violet, without question. Violet.

East staggered forward, a smile flickering on the electrified muscles of his face...and yet he
still gripped the bread knife and held it before him as he went.

“Violet,” he said. “Violet,” as he reached the dark mouth of the barn. He reached only his arm inside to paw for the lights. “Violet...”

For a moment before he hit the switch, his eyes made out shapes across the barn floor. The carnage of his fury; the shattered tanks, splintered shelves, the slaughtered giants too primitive to be either plant or amoeba but so large that he had barely chiseled them down. Dark blobs glowing so very dimly in the blue light from outside. And even as his finger tips found the switch, East saw several of the hulking mounds
move
...

At the revelation in the full light from overhead, East screamed. Not a cry. Not a shout. A scream...

The pale masses of primal flesh lay where he had left them, for the most part. They rested in the splinters of glass and wood on the floor. But the floor as he had left it had been awash in nutrient solution from the shattered tanks and overturned pools. Now it was dry, the spilled nourishment greedily
absorbed.

A small mass twitched by his foot, but his eyes flicked horrified between several of the larger pallid blobs. From one – twisted in anguished knots – there protruded a slim, nearly skeletal arm which clawed at the floorboards in an attempt to pull itself along. An almost spherical mass nearer to him was smooth except for the outlines of bones pressing at its skin; humped vertebrae like the horny spine of a dinosaur, ribs like prison bars picked out in vivid relief.

The once inviting cradle of her pelvis was now some sharp and hateful animal skull yawning to tear through the flesh of another blob, this one with glass shards stuck in it. Somehow, several pseudopods like grotesque flippers slapped at the floor to draw this horror along.

A thumping drew East’s streaming eyes to the greatest of his crop, still hulking despite his attack. Though rent and cleft by his blows, it loomed, and a rudimentary human leg hung from its side, stamping at the ground in an obscene convulsion.

“Ohh, God...oh, Violet...oh
God!
” East sobbed. It was the vodka, the vodka and insanity...

“Carl,” Violet’s voice rattled, to his side.

He dare not look dare not look...

He looked.

The 140-pound vessel he had set out to catch her soul. The clay for her to mold. The voice, of course, came from that. From the mockery of vocal cords shaped from that primordial matter.

He met Violet’s eyes there. Not much else of her showed in that too white rubbery flesh. The light from above made her eyes dark skull socket pools, made pools under the jutting of her bony cheeks. Her mouth was a wide, gnashing orifice. It was a face wasted by cancer, this now her subconscious conception of herself. It was a face of suffering. The mouth worked, the eyes blinked. They were white like the flesh, no color left in them.

“Carl...” the deep, sepulchral voice groaned.

Had she started with the destination mass he had cultivated as her spirit’s receptacle? Found it lying on the boards and taken it anyway...but then needed more cells to take full form, to duplicate the great complexity of her former body? Or had her spirit become confused in transit, sent forth as it was in the delirium of her pain? Had he acted prematurely, and in smashing his experiment, shattered her focus? Had he done this to her?

Or had the cancer in her brain had its own tenacity for life...also imposed its will in the making of this tormented sculpture? And might it continue to make its will known; its hunger?

“Caaarrl.”

A number of the blobs had variations on those crude flippers, used them or a single distorted limb to drag themselves along, and East realized their intention. They were hopelessly attempting to converge, to meet. To unite. It was futile. Several blobs were already floundering against each other helplessly. It was good that they couldn’t link. Their mass, united, would only result in one great monster in the place of these many.

East thought of the hypothetical monster of Dr. White. Growing to the orbit of Pluto, and beyond. In his mind, he saw these creatures drawing on more nutrients, growing without his diligent pruning and burning, dragging their bulks out into the world, a herd of cancerous titans, hungry...so hungry to
live.
A herd of gods. Idiot gods. He began to laugh...laugh and wag his head. Laugh and wag his head and shake with wrenching sobs that pummeled him inside.

“Carl,” Violet moaned. Her face implored him from one blob, a beseeching arm reached for him from another. He stumbled back into the threshold, thinking that the creatures meant to seize him, engulf him, absorb him, grow larger and hungrier yet.

“Carl...kill me...”

“Yes,” he sobbed.

“Kill me.”

“I will. I will, darling.”

The fear went out of him at those words, washed out of him in his tears, and with a purity of purpose, East went to the reaching hand and took hold of it. The fingers were cold but strong as they clasped his. He pulled the blob into the center of the floor...then went to push another of them closer. Another. The leg of the great hulk did its best to assist him in sliding itself along.

Last, the mass with her face. East avoided looking at it as he lifted the thing in his arms. Ignored her mouth as it worked in dry sobs against his chest. Gently, reverently, he set this creature down with the others.

He walked across the floor boards to where several cans of gasoline were lined up along the inner wall by the lawnmower. “I love you, darling,” he choked, returning to splash the fluid across the hideous congregation. “Oh, God...I love you...”

She shook now with sobs herself, painful retches that made most of the fragments of her quiver and spasm, and with their combined bulk made the floor tremble. East could only bear it long enough to complete his task.

He poured the last of the second gasoline can over his own head and shoulders. Then he went to her, unafraid, and knelt down for her to gently enfold him. An arm from this mass wrapped around his back, most of a hand from that mass clutched at his sleeve. He met her eyes again, and though they appeared blind he felt their contact. He clasped himself against her for a few moments, both of them now hushed, strangely calmed, before he dug the lighter from his pocket.