Nocturnal Emissions (24 page)

In a moment, however, Kubin felt fingers claw at the back of his jacket. They pumped their legs harder, their white leggings spattered with the black grit. When Kubin looked again to see how Morrow was holding up, he saw her cupping the side of her neck and wincing. He thought she had been clawed there…but in the past few seconds a terrible pain had begun lancing through the front of his own neck, and his intuition told him what it was. Under this stress, their bodies were giving out. The injuries their hosts had died from—a neck broken, a throat slit against the green glass wall—and which had been healed, for a time, when they took possession of the bodies, were returning. Like Golding’s bullet wound.

Suddenly, a young woman went racing past them at top speed, despite her great bell-like skirts. A group of other Masque picked up their own speed to tear after her, capes billowing behind them like the wings of demons. She didn’t get very far; Kubin saw them tackle her, drag her down…pile atop her screaming form, burying it. Again, some intuition, some instinct of his stolen vehicle, told him what had happened. When the crowd had caught up with Golding, rather than him being pushed out of his body, he had sought to hide his identity by pushing himself into one of the bodies of the predators, taking his victim by surprise. But the ruse hadn’t worked…they had sniffed him out.

And this time, Kubin doubted he would break free again.

While his eyes were off her, Kubin felt Morrow tug violently at his arm.

The pain exploded in his neck, and he stumbled, lost his footing. Their hands were wrenched apart. Off balanced, Kubin pitched forward, rolled, came up on one elbow. He saw what had happened. A number of the Masque had reached Morrow, and locked themselves onto her with bony talons or hands turning to sludge inside velvet gloves. Four of them pinned her to the sand, wrestling past each other like a frenzy of sharks, each trying to place a focusing palm flat against her chest. Each hoping to be the one to evict her from her body, and take her place within it.

Three citizens crashed down onto Kubin, but before he lost sight of Morrow, their eyes met through the tangle of bodies. There was panic in them.

But worse, an awful resignation. He recognized it, because he was experiencing it himself…

Then the clawing, the pushing. Not so much of hands, but of minds.

Minds scratching long cracked nails down the bone shell of his skull. A skull that was going to give out, give way beneath the pressure, like that cracking and crumbling green glass barrier…

Faces hovering over him, changing as some were yanked aside to be replaced by others. Faces too close, too ravenous. The Masque were not so much decaying now, as self destructing with a terrible kind of violence, as if their cells were exploding in firecracker chains. A burst eye flowed out from under a mask, down a blue-black cheek pulled taut with swelling gases. Kubin still gripped his walking stick, and he stabbed it through the mask and into his attacker’s remaining eye. With a choked rattle, and the end of the stick jutting out the back of its softened skull, the creature fell off him—only to be replaced by another, this one a woman with the flesh of her cheeks sloughing off in great flaps, her lower lip flopped inside out, and blood foaming between the few blackened teeth still left in her grinning jaws.

Was his own skull softening? Splitting at the sutures? Or was that just the insistent
pushing
of those many spectral hands in his head?

Above him, beyond the faces, he saw the sky strobe again, but he did not see the lightning strike a second of the massive globes. The net of blue fire.

The crisped sting rays falling away.

One of his flailing hands was pinned under a knee. Someone bit into his other hand to hold it still. But then Kubin released the arch of his back, and stopped fighting. He did not try, like Golding, the trick of pushing at one of
them
. Crowding them out instead. He let go. He
wanted
to go…

For a moment, he saw his own body beneath him…small…distant…

before it was covered by those of the Masque.

For a moment, he thought he was reborn as one of those rays. Soaring. But he was insubstantial, a tatter, a wind-blown rag.

Impossible gulfs of space, time and dimension away, a body jerked, convulsed, then went slack on a table with its face buried inside a complex helmet of machinery. The other male body had already spasmed and then gone still, a couple of minutes earlier. His life support monitors showed a spiked mountain range…and then a low and infinite plateau. Like the body of the wall-city…

A third bolt of lightning cracked the sky. The third globe was struck, enveloped.

The third body on its morgue-like slab, this time a woman, arched her back violently as if electrocuted. Her heels drummed on the table that held her.

By the time the monitoring techs had reached their consoles, it was too late.

The three jumpers were dead.

But Morrow could see. If this sense could indeed be likened to sight. All around her lay the sea. She was adrift. Had she survived the attack of those predators after all? Had they cast her on the waters, mistaking her as an empty husk?

With a sense that could be likened to hearing, but was not quite, she heard someone calling her name. It was Golding. So Golding had survived, somehow, as well. Morrow swivelled her perceptions in his direction.

The sight, or presence, of him did not shock her. She felt a kind of buoyant serenity. A calmness, as the poisoned waves rocked her. She swivelled her attention around behind her, and there loomed the vast white dome that was Kubin. She sensed his voice speaking to her, as well. This pleased her.

From out here, the wall-city seemed so small…no longer arrogantly dividing land from sea; just a low, gray stripe tracing and merging with the horizon. Spectral. Dead.

Flocks of rays that had been fortunate enough to be airborne when the Pod was struck by lightning came in to roost upon their rounded apexes. And they drifted, and slowly circled each other, but always remained in more or less a triangular pattern.

They spoke to each other. And they would not be alone—ever. And they would be immortal, while all of the manor-city went silent inside, leaving only its many windows staring emptily like the eye holes in a gigantic, discarded mask.

Channel 9:

nocturnal

emissions

#1: The Ghost Factory

Over the tops of the trees you can see the factory from my two livingroom windows that loom twice as tall as me since the ceiling of this old house is twice again as tall as it needs to be but that was the way they used to build these old houses a hundred years ago because often there would gather a thick blue mist a few feet to even a yard in depth that would sneak in unseen no matter how you tried to seal it out with putty and it would accumulate up there against the ceiling like a pool suspended above your head churning slowly sometimes fading to almost a haze but other times coagulating into solid matter that would later soften and dissolve again according to unknown conditions or alien seasons and I see grates in the ceiling that would help drain off this fog with the help of intake fans behind them but since the nearby factory that generated this fog is gone now the grates have long been plastered over leaving only shapes like fossil imprints but across the tops of the trees I can see from my windows the ghost image of that factory even though it closed its doors and was demolished forty years ago it is a negative blue image like something you’d see developing through the chemicals of a photographer’s tray an afterimage of residual energy imprinted on the place where the factory used to stand like a fossil in the air that glows brightly at night through the branches of the inter-vening trees a residual presence so strong you could almost climb its stairs if you could find your way inside it and I’ve heard that occasionally curious people and youngsters have found their way inside and sometimes you can see their glowing blue faces screaming silently from the factory windows and maybe this would account for the bodies that are buoyed along on the current of blue fog that flows down the street some nights according to certain conditions or alien seasons it is an almost solid current of blue ectoplasm like electric cold blue lava and floating on this current are mysterious corpses that have swollen to twice the size they should be like black balloons with blistered skin showing pink and metallic silver inside with silver mucus flowing from their nostrils and ears and anuses and their eyes stare silver and their mouths gape open in silent screams and you can look out from your windows and see them bobbing past on the surface of the fog until it begins to soften and dissolve and run off into the grates along the curb of the street that runs down the hill from where the old factory stood and in the morning sanitation trucks will come along playing tinny music like ice cream trucks and stop to collect the odd body or two like beached whales that sometimes burst I hear if they aren’t handled carefully and wisps of blue gas will curl out of their ruptured bellies and someone told me they once saw this happen and heard a thin pitiful cry escape along with the gas like a genie freed from a bottle which is appropriate because it was bottles of medicine they used to manufacture at that plant a tonic of silvery fluid that when rubbed on the flesh eased muscle ache with its cool fire and stimulated hair growth when rubbed into the scalp but which caused the pupils and irises of one’s eyes to divide like amebas into two distinct nuclei in the white of your eye if you accidentally rubbed your eyes without washing your hands first and this double vision enabled the afflicted to look at you and see not only you but your double and this double would be moving differently from yourself and maybe weeping silently or smiling in a sinister way and mouthing unheard words or else this double would appear like a dead person though standing up if you were standing up and sitting down if you were sitting down and perhaps even covered in blood or missing its head in some terrible accident or dead from old age even though you yourself might be very young even a child but can you believe that some people actually rubbed this cold silver fire into their eyes on purpose or filled eye droppers with it so they could make their eyes split like amebas and see these visions deliberately yet it was this side effect that caused the company to go out of business and shut down though at night when the blue vapor starts coursing down the street like the pseudopod of some titanic ameba you can smell a cold medicinal fire on the breeze and the hair on your head will crawl seductively and I close the windows so I won’t smell it and I draw the shades but around their edges I can still see a phosphorescence that my landlady actually finds nostalgic but then you have to consider that her husband worked at that factory and she told me he and she would lie in bed at night and gaze up at the blue fog swirling against their high ceilings built so high to give the fog enough room to churn and they would sleep under its soothing glow like a blanket after all it was the source of their income like a sun that nurtured them a life-giving substance back then they didn’t see it as a kind of pollution and the old woman will actually go out on her porch on the nights that the fog pours down the street and rock in her chair by its ghostly light on the porch that runs along the front of this immense ancient house in which I have recently rented the studio apartment in back while another tenant and her young daughter rent an attic apartment and I think you could easily divide this sprawling house into a dozen apartments and still leave enough room for my landlady to live in but she’s humble and finds our two rents sufficient she lives frugally on her husband’s pension and I’ve heard her sobbing quietly in mixed sadness and fondness as she rocks on the front porch fond and nostalgic for days gone by when her husband rocked beside her and the factory was a physical solid place not a photographic negative behind the trees that she gazes toward in the night as if she’s watching her husband walk up the hill to work with his lunch box in hand smiling as if she might see him come walking back down the hill at the end of the day but I heard that he was one of the workers killed in an explosion that occurred a year before the plant shut down another big reason it ended up closing its doors and a tank burst and a river of silver fluid came gushing down that hill and the neighbors rushed out my landlady among them and children who got too close were swept off in the cold burning flood and my landlady had tears in her eyes when I moved in and she told me all this and how she saw her husband’s body in that flood of hair tonic burned black and crumbling like ashes but showing pink and silver inside and the woman who rents the attic whispered that one night the landlady rushed out toward the flowing blue fog of residual energy when she saw a ballooned body bobbing along that she took for her long-dead husband but the tenant grabbed the lady just in time and pulled her away from the fog’s cold burning touch and up close the old woman could see it wasn’t her husband floating past but just another overly curious teenager going into the ghost factory on a dare or a homeless person seeking shelter inside a mirage made more real by dementia or the desire for self annihilation though she still rocks out there on the nights the flood creeps silently down the hill as if she still waits for her husband’s body to be borne along again born again and maybe she hopes to dive into the flow and cling to his buoyant body and let the current sweep her away with him to wherever it may disappear

#2: The Chained Man

There’s this glass tube that runs along the bottom of the china cabinet above the work counter of my tiny kitchen a cabinet so tall I need to climb on a chair and then on the counter itself to reach the top shelves the kitchen seeming to be taller than it is wide and this glass tube affixed to the bottom of the china cabinet is a power conduit with blue electricity coursing through it so it glows blue like neon but I can dim the flow with a brass knob though I can never shut it off completely and I found that if I carefully remove the glass tube to expose the electricity as it runs freely from one hole in the wall to another I can poke a long fork into it with a hotdog on the tines and cook that hotdog just right but one night when I did this I was impatient for the hotdog to cook so I turned the knob all the way up and suddenly the electric stream was gone and the whole house blacked out so that I was thrust into darkness absolute except for the blue glow around the edges of the curtains it being one of those nights the ghost factory sent out its polluted river and behind the walls or beyond the ceiling I heard a long chain rattling as if it were shooting through a metal pipe and let me tell you that I’ve never heard my landlady’s voice before while I was in my apartment or that of the divorced woman with her daughter in the attic for that matter but this night I did hear my landlady behind the wall or beyond the ceiling when she cried out muffled but shrill

“Oh no oh no oh no” and I heard the chain rattling outside now so I peeled back a curtain to see that a man was scampering headfirst down the side of the enormous house with no clothes on and no hair and no eyes and a chain was secured to a harness that looked almost like it was stitched or bolted into his skeletal frame now bear in mind the woman told me she and her husband never had any children so either she has been lying or doesn’t count this off-spring as a legitimate human being or else it might even be another tenant of hers whose presence she has denied for one reason or another I have suspected that there may be more apartments and tenants after all not just me and the woman in the attic maybe even tenants that the landlady has forgotten the existence of since this house is so vast that I wonder if she can remember her way around it in any case this man reached the lawn and started running away on all fours like a dog but through the walls or beyond the ceiling I heard that sound of a chain rattling through a pipe again and piercing squeals like a great wheel was turning and the chain went taut and started dragging the naked eyeless man backward again as he dug at the lawn to resist and he grimaced but made no sound as his body was pulled squirming and kicking up and up the side of the house in jerks of the chain out of my range of sight and then the squealing wheel sound was gone so I let the shade fall back into place and I felt my way back to my miniature kitchen back to the kitchen counter and guiltily fitted the glass tube into place and turned the knob down low until after a while the power kicked in again and electricity flowed calmly through the tube as it had before glowing serenely in my kitchen like a neon tube and after that night you can bet I stuck to sticking my hotdogs into the gas flames of my greasy little stove instead

#3: The Tenants

I had spoken briefly with the woman who rented the attic apartment when I first came to look into renting my smaller studio apartment at the rear of the house she being a very short and plump Oriental woman with a pleasant round face that when she smiles narrows eyes that look taut from cosmetic surgery to give her double lids and a longer nose but she has deeply sour breath that made me hold my own breath when we conversed and rolls of fat at the back of her neck that I noticed were red and chafed in their creases but until this morning I had never seen her daughter whom she had referred to as Hee a girl in her late teens I guessed who looks tall and slim and thus doesn’t resemble her mother at all though she is still much shorter than me maybe only 5 feet 4

the illusion of height being partly that her face is small and her body well proportioned with a long torso and long slender legs and hair to her shoulder blades made both artificially auburn and wavy and since it was a muggy afternoon today she wore a white tube top and a miniskirt with thin colorful horizontal stripes like static on a TV that showed off expanses of skin which despite her modest size seemed to me like landscapes of flesh like smooth brown oceans of skin one could drift upon and explore for hours or months at a time a skin so perfect it seemed plastic so that I was quite beguiled as I peeked out at her from around a shade as she paced in the driveway apparently waiting for someone maybe a friend or her mother to come down and drive her somewhere but she wasn’t irritated instead passed the time by brightly singing a song that went “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone… Silicone Swirl” over and over as if this were all she could remember of this song as again and again she paced and occasionally pirouetted on a heel with a sudden flourish singing “Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl” and upon completing one of these pirouettes she was left facing my window directly and maybe the suddenness of her halt made her notice my shade where it was indented because she cast a bright smile up at me I hoped not a mocking smile I hoped as sincere a smile as it looked and she waved the fingers of one hand cutely before spinning into her pacing stride again and resuming her song and this time maybe even for my benefit she twirled the index finger of both hands in front of her tube top over where the nipples of her tiny breasts would be as she sang “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl”

#4: Surprisingly, a Gift!

When you’re lonely as most of us are you tend to watch too much TV and maybe for a sense of soothing nostalgia for a time when I was also lonely but at least young enough to believe I could resolve that in the future I had taken lately to watching a show I used to enjoy in the 70s called
Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski
the character being a detective who was also a psychiatrist not only for his fellow officers but dispensing his therapy and advice to anyone he might come into contact with on the tough city streets and he was raised on those streets so he knew what he was talking about this slight little man always in the same somewhat too small charcoal gray suit and narrow tie with his hair receding from his dome and a squinty little face always carrying a tiny black revolver like a toy but he was a mean shot when it came to picking the bad guys off fire escapes and rooftops though he was all compassion when counseling troubled officers well I was ready to lose myself in another rerun episode and bobbing my head to the exciting opening song called
Let it Burn
sung by sassy black women when I heard the screen door of the miniature enclosed porch outside my apartment slam shut so I got up and walked to my door and peeked out and there just inside my tiny porch was a cardboard box which I found was addressed to me but which bore no return address so I carried the box which wasn’t heavy to my kitchen table and sliced it open and rummaged through the wadded up newspapers inside and when I withdrew my hands I found that a confetti of tiny bits of paper came sprinkling out and as they fell on the table I noticed that each carefully snipped tiny scrap bore a bit of punctuation whether a comma or period or question mark or exclamation point which struck me as coincidental because the computer on which I am writing these thoughts for you has been malfunctioning for several months it’s an older model as you can see from the condition of the glass parts of which it is almost entirely made except for the black rubber keys and knobs and valves and toggle switches of tarnished brass worked in here and there the glass being scuffed and scratched and in one area the blue electricity that flows through the tubes at the back of the machine behind the circular glass screen leaked out a crack one time and blackened the glass opaque there after which a series of my punctuation keys no longer functioned these including the period, comma, semicolon, dash, parentheses, question mark, and exclamation point keys; though I had still retained the apostrophe, hyphen, ellipsis, colon, slash, etc. Now, as I took in this spill of disjoined punctuation, I noticed that the wadded up newspapers I had pulled out were riddled with tiny holes as if bugs had been nibbling through them, though I realized at once that these were the spots where someone had patiently cut out every bit of punctuation—at least, the punctuation that corresponded to my malfunctioning keys—from their pages. Furthermore, at the bottom of the box I found handfuls of colorful plastic magnets of the type children use to spell out the alphabet and words on their parents’ refrigerators, though in my case the magnets solely consisted of periods, commas, and more of the punctuation marks I had been so long denied. So as
Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski
played in the background, reassuring me with its nostalgia and its reassuring hero, I sat before the door to my fridge and placed all those magnets upon it, spacing them out in such a way that one would expect words to settle themselves into those gaps later, when I had decided what those words should be.