CHAPTER 16

The cracks, the wormwood, and the green . . .

Two absinthe bottles lay shattered, green droplets seeping through the jagged cracks. Simon’s malachite eyes stare, shattered, tears seeping out of the green and the jagged cracks of red. There had been romantic music playing. Now, only the sound of the record spinning.

Only the spinning record. No needle. No voice.

Only Jane’s eyeless head. No Dead Water. No voice.

She was not talking to him.

Simon staggers and paces his basement laboratory. The wounded scarecrow. Two bottles of absinthe and the walls bend and bubble, but no Dead Water. No Jane.

“Why, Jane?” he asks the lovely head, yanking at the brier patch of tangled hair, hands shaking violently in necro-withdrawal. Those empty sockets. No golden eyes. No peace. Why couldn’t he go to the ebony sea where she had animus?

He sits on the stainless steel table, hugging her lovely head to him, running a tactile-hungry finger over her Mona Lisa smile.

“You’re not all here, Jane. Not all here.”

Where is his Y-shaped doorway to paradise?

“Boy meets girl,” croon the Corbies. “Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back . . . one piece at a time.” The Corbies cackle and more cracks form in Simon’s eyes. “One piece at a time.”

“The bread crumb trail,” echoes Ichabod’s voice.

He holds up her head like a conch shell, presses the empty, ocular cavity to his ear, and strains to listen. He still cannot hear the dark ocean.

* * * * *

“Apex Consumers—take a bigger bite out of life. How may we help you?”

“She . . . won’t talk to me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Can I interest you in Arthur Drake’s Guide to More Powerful Relationships?”

“Your infomercials haunt me. You’ve always been there. Before this all started. My biorhythms . . . are bugged.”

“We are so glad you enjoyed our quality programming and will take the next step with Apex Consumers: Be at the top of your food chain in business and in life.”

“Jane won’t talk to me. I thought I might have done something wrong. I thought she was angry. But now I think it’s because I only have Jane’s head. I have to find the rest of her.”

“We at Apex Consumers would like to help you find the missing pieces in life, sir. Be the apex consumer. Don’t be the consumed.”

“I will find her. I will put her back together. I will find out how you’re involved.”

“Arthur Drake wants to be involved in your success, sir. Join the program today and we will help you achieve everything you have ever hungered for and everything you never knew you hungered for.”

“He warned me about you. He said pyramid schemes are dangerous.”

“Oh, we’re not a pyramid scheme, sir. We are a program of intense self-actualization, from the inside out, and an award-winning system that teaches you how to actively manifest positive realities. Anything is possible, sir, if you have the hunger.”

“Ichabod said you were zoophagy on a mass-market scale. What did he mean by that?”

“Could you hold the line a moment? My manager would like to talk to you. Sir. . . ?”

* * * * *

Simon drives northwest. Every few miles he reaches into his pocket and feels the leather shreds of flesh clinging to the ancient bone. Dusk creeps in, and Simon smiles.

These are good roads.

Forty-five miles and the highways and numbers blur by: 90 and 53 and 12. Urban gives way to suburban and wetlands and yellow and red and orange leaves—and then everything darkens.

Dusk saunters and struts, and Simon smiles.

These are good roads.

These back roads—twisted and windy, curving. Hug the curve, accelerate. Feel that happy rise in the gut. Twisted roads, not straight lines, no grids, no mundane workman’s web, no banality in the hissing leaves. They squirm through bog and wetland and river bridge. Good night-driving roads. More hobgoblins per capita here. A twisted trail straight into October Country.

Good and twisted roads. They are the spine of some autumnal god, and I a jolly shiver. Eh, Jane?

As a boy, Simon traveled with his parents far from the city, for visits to relatives or for fall jaunts to an apple orchard. Simon remembers his father accelerating on these back roads at night, on the way home. The soothing motion and dark safety. He was able to vanish inside his head, or stare up and out of the moon roof, mouth open in wonder. All those autumn and after-autumn skeleton trees. Bone-branch hands in silhouette, post-October claws—giant, scarecrow hands reaching for greedy handfuls of stars and moon. He was certain he was glimpsing, without really understanding, some kind of game that the scarecrow gods played, cosmic jacks in the void.

The spoils, Jane? I once heard that the moon starts the month empty and dark, then fills with luminous souls and, when full, releases the ghosts whither they go.

Simon accelerates.

Simon hugs the curve.

Sometimes, Jane, I wonder—are there any ghosts that resist the moon? Does the vacuum of space mute their howls as they claw the earth, gripping so tenaciously they tug the tides?

Simon accelerates.

The bone-tree claws snatch more frantically.

Maybe their game comes to a close.

And sometimes, Jane, I wonder—where do the moon-dumped souls go? Maybe they’re the winnings of some lucky scarecrow.

Simon accelerates.

Skeleton hands full of moon flash in the rearview mirror. The perfect song plays on the speakers. Simon leans into the curve at the perfect speed, the perfect angle. He bobs his head. It would surely look strange to a passerby. Simon bobs his head and cranes his neck, undulating, shifting his viewpoint, partly to the play of music, but mostly to make the moon, through his malachite eyes, dance in the perfect manner: bouncing through branches, alluding bone hands.

Simon does not need absinthe to hallucinate. The wormwood just lubricates the process.

Now, on the winding back road, he puts it all together, his multimedia artwork: the song, speed, curve, moon motion, and marching scarecrow deities. The result is a perfect moment—just a second—and a perfect expression. The moon oozes through the smudges in the glass, bleeding ghost blood down the dirty windshield.

“An Un-Still Life in Ghost Plasma.” Eh, Jane?

A truck passes on the road, high-beam bubble-bursting.

Simon snaps back and swerves.

Simon frowns.

Was he being silly? Spending too much effort for something too ethereal—just a moment for an audience of one? No way to record or crystallize or share. Even a passenger would have to look through his skull windows to see. But then, another fast curve seduces him.

The ethereal is important. Eh, Jane?

“It’s important that you do this, Simon,” caws a Corbie.

“Don’t stop, Simon,” says another.

“Don’t ever stop.”

Simon accelerates, maybe too much. Then again, lovelings, speed limits and No Smoking signs miss the point. A habit loses all its poetry if it can’t kill you.

* * * * *



The water was the color of strong tea, Jane. Darker than amber. Full of acid and memories and prehistoric bird cries. Brackish water turned my screams to bubbles. Old memories in the water, Jane, and they had a grip like iron.

“We’re locking up in a half-hour, sir,” the ranger says.

“Just going for a quick walk.”

Simon had parked down the street from the entrance to the nature preserve’s parking lot. Patience turns to hot wax in front of obsession; Simon had not heard from Nyx and all he had was Ichabod’s hint and an ancient bone in his pocket. He takes a handful of information pamphlets from a wood-and-glass box in front of the Volo Bog visitor center.

Simon feels the bone in his pocket, and a moment of déjà vu skitters across his brain as he tries but fails to recall a ghost story from his youth. It is a folktale, a spook tale. Perhaps you heard it, or one like it, as a child. They are called jump stories. You scream at the end of the telling and make your audience jump, the trick being to subtly talk quieter and quieter as you go, making the audience lean in closer and closer.

This is the story Simon was trying to recall. It goes: a boy (or maybe an old woman), who is in the garden (or maybe taking a shortcut through the cemetery), finds an oversized big toe (or maybe just a toe bone) sticking out of the ground. He (or she) plucks the toe (or bone) from the ground and hears a terrible moan. The little boy (or old woman) goes home and cooks up a pot of soup with the body part, a graveyard stew. While he (or she) eats, something outside keeps calling for its bone. “I want my bone back!” In the end, that something rushes into the house. That is when the storyteller screams and the audience jumps.

Remember jumping?

Remember wondering what that thing was that wanted its bone?

Simon steps onto a boardwalk that sloshes side to side, precariously, with no handrails.

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

Gray birds, standing almost as tall as Simon, sound their primordial trumpet as they wade in the marshy water with little fear or regard. A pamphlet informs Simon that they are sandhill cranes, one of the most ancient of the surviving bird species. Their call is full of Mesozoic reptile sex.

The bog has an old memory. Eh, Jane?

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

Another pamphlet goes on to say that the bog is a very unique slice of bio-landscape and habitat. Volo Bog is the only “quaking bog” in Illinois, this part of the state having been shaped by the lust between glaciers and earth in the long ago. The glaciers brought primal slices of rock and silt and ice from far away and deposited them here. Hunks of glacial ice sank into the ground where they melted, forming a deep, fifty-acre lake. Six thousand years ago, the lake started filling in with vegetation—sphagnum moss—that formed a thick, floating layer. The decomposing plant matter worked an alchemy on the water, turning it acidic and dark.

Every year, the sphagnum moss thickens, closes a little tighter, and the open mouth of water at the bog’s center gets a little smaller. One day, in millennia to come, that mouth will close.

One day, Jane, nature will cover something up, something cocooned in a coffin of ice from far away, something carrying prehistoric secrets.

Simon walks toward the bog’s center, the boardwalk swaying. He passes through vegetation zones, rings of dramatic foliage change, Dantean circles of the bog’s development. Patches of sphagnum moss blanket much of the water, so thick in places that shrubs and trees grow on top, floating over the acidic waters.

A pamphlet informs Simon that a person could walk on the moss mat, but such activity is against the law as falling through is very dangerous. The moss is like ice over a river—one might fall through it into darkness and never again find the way they entered.

Another pamphlet touches on the subject of bog bodies. In Irish and British bogs, cadavers of prehistoric humans have been found, their skins turned to leather and tanned, their clothes and flesh well preserved in the cold, acidic, low-oxygen water. Through the strange, primordial alchemy of the bog, the skin and organs—even the last meal in the guts—remain intact, but the bones are often dissolved. The effects of this preservation are so dramatic that it is not readily apparent whether a corpse was in the bog for decades or centuries. The oldest body discovered was carbon dated at over ten thousand years old.

The pamphlet shows a picture of a man over two thousand years old. His face is perfectly preserved, down to the creases and expressions on the face. He looks like the figure of a sleeping man finely crafted from brown leather.

Oh, Jane, to cut a Y into someone so old. For the feel of flesh and organs so transfigured between my fingers . . .

A true bog body had never been found at Volo Bog, though there are stories of escaped criminals who made a dash through the wetlands, or children who wandered off, never to be seen again.

Perhaps they are there, Jane, underneath. The bog embalming them right now . . .

Simon walks.

The Tamarack Ring: pine trees with soft needles grow. Not immortal evergreen pines, these needles turn brown and die in the autumn.

Golden needles.

Splashes of poison sumac red.

Moss flowing green over amber water.

Here and there, carnivorous plants, hungry for the nutrients of living prey to help them survive the harsh acidic water.

What was buried in the ice, Jane? What was planted in the ground there—so malevolent even the plants turn to predators?

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

Terrain shifts, progressing from vegetative zone to zone. Simon reaches the center, the open water mouth of the bog.

Or maybe, Jane, maybe it was not a mouth but an eye—an amber eye the color of strong tea, staring gigantically up at the sky.

He feels the withered bone in his pocket.

“I want my bone back!” yells the fiend from the partial memory of the childhood story.

Fish don’t last in this water, just bugs and reptiles and amphibians. Simon stares into the water—the amber water, dark and still, forming a polished mirrored surface, a dark looking glass reflecting Simon and the twilight.

Simon holds out the bone. And releases.

The water swallows it with barely a sound.

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

“Garoo-a-a-a!”

Simon stares at himself in the dark mirror. Prehistoric bird calls, then the silence of plants eating. The sun sinks, winking out on the horizon, the gesture of a shifty con man who may never return. And Simon stares.

Some things, Jane, are so small they are hard to find. But other things . . .

Minutes pass in weird, geological rates.

Simon stares and stares, realization finally coming in gradual degrees. He notices something. But what was it? His gaze shifts over the water, glimpsing pieces, trying to find the whole. Fear oozes into his stomach, then rises up the throat. Maybe a thousand feet, maybe a mile up, and he would have had a better view of the whole, the shifting movements under the water.

Some things, Jane, are so small they are hard to find. Some other things are so impossibly huge as to be imperceptible.

Croaking sounds now. Insects or amphibian calls. Were the amphibians awake this time of year? Simon cannot find the answers in the pamphlets before the papers fall out of his hand and scatter, snatched by a sudden wind. The croaking continues. Simon wonders if he imagines it—the name he hears in the croaking melody:

“Simon-Simon-Simon-Simon-Simon-Simon . . .”

He steps back. The wood underfoot disintegrates. No silent-screen acrobatics can stop him from falling over the edge.

Simon lands on his back. The world turns to Jell-O and the earth gives under his weight. The sphagnum moss trembles but holds.

Simon is suddenly aware of just how much he does not want the moss to give, does not want to fall into the amber depths where something too big to comprehend is moving. He lies still.

Something grips—

His wrists.

His feet.

Suck and slosh and the world above vanishes into amber shadows and screams that taste like acid. Simon thrashes in a world the color of strong tea. His hands cannot find an opening in the moss ceiling.

Living.

Squishy.

Hateful.

Finally he glimpses it, the open mouth—or the eye. He swims for it. But something locks a tight grip on his ankles. Bubbled screams churn the water. All he can see now is clouded tea and vegetation. His mind cannot decipher the movements in the water.

But he feels the hands. Patches of leather. All over.

Dead Water, Jane. I wanted it so badly I drowned in it.

He’d given the bone back to something—something frozen in time. Something ancient, deposited into the ground in a coffin of ice. Something lurking in amber, mummifying fluids. Something that turned the water to acid and the plants to killers.

Legions of hands pull him down. Swarms of silhouettes circle him in the dim. There’s a special purgatory in the amber water, liquid necromancy preserving the souls. Maybe the thing has the power to creep into the minds of locals and whisper to them, tell them how special this place is, how the mossy sarcophagus should be protected and preserved, murky and safe. It lures children, in dreams, occasionally convincing one to walk on out on the trembling not-earth. Or maybe it simply loves its visitors so much it preserves them in acid memory forever.

Nothing so sharp, at the edge of the Abyss, than the voice that screams, “Plunge!”

Leather hands grab Simon’s cheeks.

Murky face.

Leather lips.

A withered tongue enters his mouth. Simon tries to scream. Muck and brackish water flow down the throat like dead languages. This place has a very old memory. Simon has fallen into the soup—into the dark tea. Mr. Knock’s words burn in the memory:

“Down the rabbit hole, boy! Straight through the plate glass darkly, into the secret room where Alice plays tea with corpses. No deposit, no return. Once you see the Abyss, it sees you.”

* * * * *

White lines whip by like mad ghosts. They know where they’re going. Simon does not.

White lines.

Headlights.

Exit signs.

His escape from the bog was just a blur of memory and an awful, awful taste in the back of his throat. Coughing. Crawling. Something was after him. Something is after him. Something that will catch him if he stops.

White lines.

Moonlight.

Low-fuel light.

How long has he been driving? Time and space seem unscrupulous. Simon cannot seem to find the city again. The numbers on the signs do not make sense. He’s stuck in October Country.

We don’t really sleep in dreams, Jane. That’s the work of different parts of the brain. But who is asleep, who awake? There are somnambulists tripping the dark fantastic . . .

Simon drives. His world is cracked. Somehow, he’d held onto his glasses, but the fall into the bog broke them. Cracks down the centers split his vision. But he really doesn’t want to see. He knows that if he looks back as he drives he’ll find that they are catching up to him. Black shapes. Stalking quadrupeds and shambling bipeds. They were catching up.

White lines.

Exit ramp.

Brake lights.

He’s afraid to stop too long. Quick. Just enough for fuel and directions, and then go.

A fat, dying moth vibrates in circles on the pavement of the truck stop parking lot. Lost 3:00 A.M. souls lurch about inside. Strange writings on the walls in the entryway. The burnt-out husk of a man mutters incomprehensible poetry into his chili bowl in the diner. Lost souls. Simon wonders idly if he’s dead, if he and the rest are all trapped. The cashier tells Simon where he is, shows him a map. It all makes sense.

But as soon as he’s back on the road, sense vanishes. Where is he? The signs are vague, misleading. Voices come through the static of the car radio. The bog—it’s catching up.

White lines.

Headlights.

Hazard sign.

Is that the afterlife, Jane—stretches of gray purgatory and flickering white ghosts screaming past on parade? Truck stop soul stations. Moon-Pie or hotdog? Choose wisely or you will never ascend.

Simon drives. And dozes. The shapes catch up—black dogs and things less definable. Simon snaps awake, presses the gas pedal. The needle shivers. The shapes and shades recede. But he is tired and can’t keep this up much longer. Where is the city?

White lines.

Lunar madness.

Bog bodies and black dogs.

He hits the exit ramp doing seventy-five and almost spins out. Parking, Simon runs into the rest stop. He does not bother with the map, just jams two coins into the coffee machine. He hopes the offering is enough to get him to the other side of this netherworld.

In the bathroom, the stall walls are covered in limericks and obscenities, scratched and penned. On the door, Simon reads:

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

Nail the Devil to this post—

With this mell I thrice do knock

One for God, and for Wod, and for Lok!



Writing on the stalls. Eh, Jane.

Chugging coffee, rushing outside, Simon hears children singing a familiar song:

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.

Perhaps she’ll die!”

Simon looks around but sees no other vehicles in the parking lot. The singing is coming from the picnic tables.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,

That wiggled and wriggled and tickled inside her.”

Several small figures sit at the picnic tables, in the dark.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a bird.

How absurd, to swallow a bird!”

A half-dozen small heads turn toward Simon.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a cat.

Imagine that, she swallowed a cat.”

Simon’s eyes adjust. He sees a half-dozen little faces—brown and leathery skin; bog water dripping in dark, amber gushes from the orifices in their mummy heads. They all stare through the hollows.

“She swallowed the cat to catch the bird.

She swallowed the bird to catch the spider.”

The little bog children rise from their table, reach putrid hands out to Simon. He runs back to the car, fumbling for his keys. Their voices, still high and twittering, turn to malevolent cicadas.

“She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

I don’t know why she swallowed that fly.

Perhaps she’ll die!”

The car starts. The needle shivers. Simon speeds down the roads with no sense. His world is cracked. He fights the inevitability of his Jupiter-gravity eyelids.

White lines.

Black dogs.

Bog bodies.

I think Mr. Knock is still out there, laughing. Eh, Jane?



* * * * *

Simon snatches the key from the man at the desk and runs off.

It’s catching up.

Unlock the door. Shut it. Chain it. Put a chair to it. Grab a blanket from the bed. And huddle on the floor. Simon opens a greasy fast-food sack containing an order of now-cold fries and many, many packets of salt.

I could hear Mr. Knock laughing, Jane. I think I really could.

Simon casts a circle of salt around himself, on the floor. Pure white salt.

The only one to survive, Jane. Was he really crazy?

He had to ask three times for extra salt. He would have asked again, but then he heard the children on the radio, so he sped away.

Now Simon sits in his white circle, in the dark room. His hands dance, angrily. He tries to keep his hands busy.

Black silhouettes, backlit by streetlights, stand outside the curtained windows. All is silent.

Simon keeps his hands busy.

The silhouettes press their faces to the window. Out of the corner of his eye, Simon glimpses motion in his hotel room mirror, but he dares not look. He tosses the blanket over his head, crouches on the floor, in the salt circle, and keeps his hands busy.

Hands.

Busy.

Sounds of scuttling and scratching on walls—cicada voices.

Simon shivers like a speedometer needle. He keeps his hands busy. Something is trying to tear the blanket away.

Simon does not know any proper runes. He writes Jane Doe’s name on his arm, as many times as it will fit. The scalpel gleams.

I am certain Jane, if a cat had been there, I would have eaten it.





INTERLUDE:

Requiem for the Taste Buds



What can I say? They caught me.

It’s funny. Usually no one ever notices me. I, um—I’m sorry, how do we begin? I’m never comfortable with these things. They don’t seem so very productive. Who . . . uh . . . who cares whether I think that blob of ink looks like a hummingbird or Satan riding to earth on a chariot pulled by Martha Stewart?

Hmm? Just keep talking?

Okay.

It’s—well, I guess it’s certainly strange. I mean, not Hannibal Lecter “Hello, Clarice” strange. But strange enough that I’m talking to you.

How do I get in?

Well, I just sneak in and mingle with the strangers. It’s not all that difficult getting in. Just pretend like you belong.

Why?

Huh. Guess that’s the big question.

Morbid curiosity of death?

No, not really.

There’s just so many people to talk to, and they listen, and I’m so . . . I . . . have you ever heard of the Vegetarian Cannibal? He’s in the tabloids lately. Apparently some guy wanted to be a cannibal. The problem is he’s a vegetarian so he has to—

What? My family?

I really don’t have a family to come home to. No pets either. I tried. I have allergies. But I have a great home. It’s all nice and neat. Hardly looks lived in. My cupboards are full of those great single-serve soups. Just pop one in the microwave and eat it over the sink. Alone.

They don’t taste very good.

The food after a funeral is good, though! Oh my. Wedding banquets and Labor Day barbecues have nothing on a good funeral feast. Maybe that’s why I go—for the food. There are so many funerals, after all. I just look them up and sneak right in. I never thought I’d get in so much trouble.

Friends?

I really don’t—I mean, I try, but I’m always so . . . okay, maybe this will help explain: You know all those nine-hundred numbers they advertise late at night? Well, I just called one of those. Yes, from here—when the policeman gave me my phone call. Hey, I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I just dialed the first thing that came to my head.

I watch a lot of late-night TV.

Well, this girl answers and says her name is Candy. I say my name is Clara. She says she’s wearing a sheer thong. I say I’m wearing a hand-me-down sweater from my grandmother who was put into a home when she went insane and started throwing roadkill at people. Candy sounded a little confused, so I explained that I was calling from a police station. She asked me to bend over so she could use the handcuffs. I said I didn’t have any, and then I asked her if she had ever heard of the Vegetarian Cannibal.

Then there was a long pause.

Then . . . I don’t know, something changed. Her voice changed and she said, “Clara Susquehanna Taylor, be warned! Dial no more nocturnal numbers. Do not join. Seek sanctuary. Beware the hunger!”

She said more, but I just got scared. I don’t know how she knew my last name, or my middle name. No one knows my middle name; I never use it. The kids in school were so very cruel, and—well, anyway, I panicked and hung the phone up.

What’s the first funeral I remember?

I don’t see what that has . . . all—all right. It was my father’s funeral. I was just a little girl. My mom didn’t spend much time with me that day, she was . . . she was always so . . . you know, we had the best fried chicken after that funeral! You want the recipe? You take the batter and just soak—

What?

I, um, I can’t quite say why funeral food’s so good. It’s—it’s like the taste buds sing a requiem for the deceased when you eat it. Sometimes it’s subdued and respectful, mourning a loss. Other times it’s spicy and festive, celebrating a life. You look at the lifeless husk in the casket and you think if you just keep breathing, keep eating, keep living, your turn won’t come. It tastes like salvation. You eat around people mourning death and you start to appreciate your own life more than you might normally. It’s a meal of rebirth. You say to yourself, “I’m going to finish this food and walk away changed for the better. This time around I’ll be more productive. I’ll learn to play the violin. I’ll meet new people and get out and show everyone the real me. I’ll floss.”

The feeling fades, though. I go from funeral to funeral trying to recapture it. But, inevitably, I’m back at home, eating over the sink, feeling only one thing: hunger.

Maybe that’s why I dialed the other number. The policeman was nice and let me make a second call. I called a number stuck in my head from an infomercial. Did I mention that I watch a lot of late-night TV? The number was just there, programmed in my head, and I called it.

It’s for a place called Apex Consumers. They promised to help me achieve everything I hungered for. . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.