Nocturnal Emissions (9 page)

I have confidence, or at least the prayer, that one day we will speak again.

Until then, know that I love you more than the whole of this unfathomable world, my beautiful butterfly in the making.

– Daddy.

««—»»

8/30/02

I’m sorry this card will reach you belatedly. How typical, you and your mother are bound to think. In all the fervor, I forgot until too late that today was your birthday. I truly, truly wish I had been with you. I wish I weren’t so horribly, cripplingly sad.

I should be elated, Maria. This latest find is beyond imagining, beyond comprehending. Beyond my mock profession. It is like seeing the face of God.

I feel vindicated for believing in the unbelievable.

But if only the animal were not dead. It is like looking down at the corpse of a beautiful child.

You might have seen it on the news. Maybe you even saw them interviewing your stammering, unhelpful father…his expertise sought after at last, and yet proving so inadequate, just as they always suspected.

It was some tourists hiking in the park who stumbled upon the body, lying in some ferns by the side of a little trail you and I might have walked ourselves numerous times.

At first it was thought to be a bobcat. Before I actually saw it, I myself thought it might be like the phantom panther I investigated in
Minnesota
. It would be strange enough, tabloid material in itself, if this were only about an unusual striped cat as large as a medium-sized dog. But that grin fixed on its dead face, a shockingly human-like grin, curving from ear to ear. As if to mock me. As if inviting my recognition.

I don’t want to see the dissection…assuming the cat doesn’t vanish before they dissect it. Beginning with the tail, and ending with a disembodied grin.

I don’t want to see what they find in the park next. A Mock Turtle floating dead in Jordan Pond. A March Hare rotting in the sun atop
Cadillac
Mountain
.

If these creatures must go extinct—against my instincts as a hunter of the mysterious—I hope to never bear witness to it again. It is like finding your old storybooks torn and scattered along a beloved wooded trail. It is like, forgive my morbidity, finding you lying there. Dead too soon, you precious little child. You woman I wish I knew.

Until I can acclimate to this. Until the Earth rights itself again on its axis…I must put down my pen. And my glass…

Forever yours. Forever and ever, as the storybooks say.

Good night, sweetheart.

– Dad.

Channel 4:

the night

swimmers

-ONE-

To reach the spot in
Eastborough
Swamp
where he and his brother had used to go target shooting, Jeremy Spence had to cut through the back end of
Pine
Grove
Cemetery
.

The rear border of the town’s largest graveyard had been pushed further back than when Jeremy and Allen had used to tramp into the swamp’s wooded depths, but then again, if the town itself kept increasing its population, so should its cemeteries make more room for future inhabitants. Sometimes Jeremy lamented how over-development was stripping
Eastborough
,
Massachusetts
of its farms, its woods and fields, its rural character…but this was the first time he’d considered that even the graveyards were becoming over-developed. Maybe when space grew too scarce they could bury the dead in multi-leveled condo mausoleums.

At the periphery of forest, the brothers had often found old wreathes and withered flower arrangements heaped by the groundskeepers, occasionally old slate gravestones that had been broken by vandals or snow plows. Once, they had even found a dead cat with its belly burst and full of boiling maggots as if it had given birth to those restless, mindless swarms.

Today, however, Jeremy merely crossed a bare dirt lot, plowed level, until he came to a wall of old, lichen-stained trees. There was no gradual build up of vegetation anymore. It was a sharp division of two worlds, like the edge of an ocean where it meets the shore. A bit warily, Jeremy crossed that boundary line. Almost always, he and Allen had come in autumn, when the vegetation was less lush, and when there was less likelihood of ticks and spiders and other sinister, unseen creatures lying in wait. The blue hovering smoke of their guns gave the illusion of warmth against the season’s chilly edge, and the ear-stabbing cracks of discharge seemed to carry more crisply.

Jeremy jumped nimbly over a small brook, which had once been spanned by a board that partying teens had probably laid there. His landing heel sank in rich mud, and he was reminded of stories his parents used to tell him in a vain effort to keep him out of the swamp—that there was quicksand in there, and that some people who had ventured deeply into that state-protected wetland had never returned. If quicksand didn’t work, parents had other weapons to resort to.

Indistinct ghostly lights had been glimpsed through the trees, and Allen himself, while smoking weed in Pine Grove with their cousin Jim, had witnessed a ball of light floating above the grass among the headstones…though nowadays he was inclined to think that it had been ball lightning or, more likely, a will-o’-the-wisp caused by marsh gas. At the time, in their teens, he and Jim had bolted out of the graveyard in a drug-heightened panic.

To this day, Jeremy didn’t know how many of the stories he had heard about the swamp were believable, how many of its purported dangers were real…but with his own eyes he had seen a huge, dead snapping turtle as a boy, which other children had stoned to death when they found it crawling along a back road that bordered another edge of the swamp. That was a tangible enough bit of scariness. Mostly, however, Jeremy figured it was the swamp’s oasis of wilderness, its resistance to change or eradication in the heart of this town, that intimidated its inhabitants into building upon it with their imaginations if in no other manner.

Jeremy crunched deeper into the woods, a blend of coniferous and decid-uous trees, their combined canopy blotting the sun as if the trunks were columns upholding the roof of a living cathedral. He found his eyes scanning the ground more carefully now, alert for snapping turtles lurking in moist shadows. As if an imp of the perverse sought to make him even more wary of the indigenous fauna, Jeremy recalled schoolboy whispers of pterodactyls dwelling deep in the swamp…and once when they were small and playing Frisbee in the graveyard, Allen had cried out and pointed into the air, but the great flying animal they saw—with its serpentine head cocked back—revealed itself after an astonishing few minutes to be a still impressive but not quite so terrifying blue heron. When he was older, and jogging Pine Grove’s paths, Allen reported seeing a deer standing at the edge of the forest. And only last year, on his way to work, Jeremy had seen a coyote run across the road in front of the town dump, which also bordered the swamp. On quiet nights, sometimes Jeremy could hear a chorus of coyotes howling distantly like a clan of anguished banshees.

The sight of one such wild and potentially dangerous animal, prehistoric when compared to the dogs he had always owned, had exhilarated but vaguely unsettled him. Most of all, he had felt sympathy. Recently, a black bear had been treed and shot by police in the nearby city of
Worcester
, of all places. It was the fault of humans—all that over-development—driving these creatures from their secret hiding spots…out into the open.

««—»»

There was a high metallic trill of cicadas, the swish and rustle of the brush and branches he pushed through, and the clink of the spent soda cans in the plastic bag he’d brought along, but the interior of the swamp muted all outside sound. No more lawnmowers, sirens, throbbing bass of car radios. It was all locked out by the sheer primeval weight of this forest with a swamp as its nucleus, which in fact Jeremy had never ventured in far enough to actually see.

Though not really wanting to admit any anxiety to himself, Jeremy couldn’t help but wonder if he were still on the right path. Again, he and his brother had mostly come in the fall, and since he’d left the brook behind him his surroundings had become uneasily homogeneous. Where was that little half clearing they had favored? All filled in now? It had been perhaps five years since they’d last gone shooting together. Since that time, Allen had married, moved out of Eastborough to
Worcester
. Since that time, Jeremy had met his girlfriend, rented an apartment with her. Then lost her. And now, this week, his job as well.

With time on his hands, and angry self pity on his mind, he had decided to fill those idle hands with that reliable American phallic replacement, the gun.

Just to feel less impotent, he supposed. At least he had no illusions about it. But playing DOOM on his Playstation had not satisfied the desire, no matter how many hovering Cacodemons he’d slain. He wanted to feel his snub-nosed .38

buck in his hand (the very first time he’d ever fired it, he had held it too loosely, and the hammer had gouged his thumb). He masochistically wanted his pounded ears to seem filled with cotton that only a ringing buzz pierced. His gun was his trumpet through which to project his primal scream.

It wasn’t long before he decided to forget searching for that particular clearing, and settle on any clearing at all. He was becoming more nervous about ticks and snakes by the minute, swatting at every whisper of a leaf against his bare arms, jumping at every innocent jiggle of the vegetation low to the ground. The woods ahead looked a bit thinner, the trees spaced further apart, the sun actually reaching the ground in spots. He imagined he was far enough into the forest not to have to worry about shooting too close to anyone’s property. Stepping into one of these shifting blots of summer light, Jeremy stopped and set down his plastic bag full of soda cans, unslung the book bag in which he carried his pistol, shells, and a bottle of spring water. He took a few swallows from this, glancing around him as he did so, sweating from his efforts and the humid air.

Jeremy was screwing the cap back on his bottle when his wandering gaze was attracted to a subtle glinting in the air. It was a single strand of spider web, wavering a few feet ahead of him, no doubt hanging from a branch above him.

It would have been invisible had the golden light filtering down not caught it just right. He might have walked right into it, otherwise. As it was stirring at the level of his face, and Jeremy was definitely not fond of arachnids, he decided to relocate to another spot a few yards away, and collected up his gear to do so.

He hadn’t taken more than a few steps when he froze abruptly, with a second long strand of web gently drifting in the air directly in front of his nose, this time less than a foot away. It too glistened subtly, but viewing this one closer, he noted that the strand was oddly thick for a spider web. It was almost like a narrow ribbon. Was it a web after all, then? It gave him the impression of being a strip of cellophane.

Tilting his head back, Jeremy looked up at the canopy above him, shielding his eyes and squinting carefully. After a moment, he detected several more of these breezy strands dangling down from the branches. All of them were very long, apparently snagged in the uppermost branches of trees. Some plastic refuse blown out of the town dump, which was not too distant? It was possible. Two nights ago there had been a violent thunderstorm, punishing rains and winds so strong that he had thought a tornado was brewing; several houses in town had actually been struck by lightning. Jeremy had lost power briefly while he was in the middle of reading his email.

As though stalking through a minefield, Jeremy moved forward between the strands. He had counted ten by now. Picking his way along, he would stop to stare upward, wondering if he could conclusively identify what these strips were. And now he froze again, because he had spied something far above him between the clotted foliage. There was a sheet of plastic, like a tarp, caught up there. It was very large, and apparently translucent. That explained it, then. It had probably been attached to one of the new houses that ever seemed to be popping up in town, covering an unfinished roof and blown away in the storm, partially shredded into these ribbons that hung down from it.

Jeremy was so intent on peering up at the snared plastic that he neglected the ground directly beneath him. It wasn’t until he felt his shoe press into a soft mass that he quickly looked down. The sensation had been like stepping into a puddle of half liquid matter, like ice cream…though what he saw reminded him more of the contents of a bottle of shampoo, poured out onto the ground. Whitish-translucent, and gelatinous. Jeremy stepped back from it, and wiped the sole of his shoe against the bed of dried pine needles.

He noticed several more of these gelatinous puddles scattered about. And behind the trunk of a tree ahead, what he had first, peripherally, taken to be a large stone poking up from the earth. But now he saw that it shimmered where the fragmented sunlight shifted across it.

Avoiding not only the strands now (twenty? more?), but the blobs of goo strewn about the ground as well, Jeremy stole up on the glistening hump. He stepped around the tree and saw it more clearly.

It was also a blob of that gelatinous matter, but bulked up into a smooth mound a foot high at its center. He wanted to poke it with the toe of his shoe, decided his shoe had made enough contact with the slime for one day, and looked around for a stick instead. He spotted one a few paces away, and bent to pick it up.

He felt a whisper of contact across his forehead, and instantly knew that he had touched one of those swaying ribbons, which had been unseen without the highlighting of the sun to alert him to it.

But Jeremy did not recoil back away from it. He did not straighten up erect. Nor did he complete his reaching forward for the stick just inches from his extended hand.

He held that pose. His eyes did not blink. And patches of golden summer sunlight played across his face and body…migrating across him as the hours passed, until the splotches of light became tinted copper with the coming of dusk.

-TWO-

Allen Spence left work early and drove immediately from
Worcester
to Eastborough, his mother having called and told him that his brother Jeremy was in trouble at work. He had shown up at his mother’s house this morning to rage and complain that he had been laid off. Which was bad enough. But the more unsettling thing was that Jeremy had already come by
last
Friday and told her the same thing.

Jeremy ranted that his boss was going insane, in claiming that he had laid Jeremy off a week ago, wondering why Jeremy was punching into work again today as if nothing had ever happened. His boss would have him believe it was the 16th of August, Jeremy said, pacing her kitchen floor in a rage, when it was obviously only the 9th.

Both Allen and his mother knew that it was, indeed, the 16th.

And there was another thing. Jeremy had a welt or a burn across his forehead that he couldn’t account for. He had been drinking more lately, their mother strongly suspected; she feared he had fallen somehow, struck his head.

Apparently he had lost his memory of the entire past week.