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| Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing unique at all about it. A phenomenon can’t be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual, free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguishable from each other even when they are the progeny of a single clone. |
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| —Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail |
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would spend the following two days huddled and shaking in my quiet, fully-illuminated apartment in Pomona, flinching at the slightest sound and staring at naked light bulbs. They would burn temporary blind spots in my eyes—a poor substitute for bleaching away the sights I had seen.
I don’t know whether a candid description of those images, hellishly intact and vibrant amid the chewed gristle of my incomprehension, can serve any purpose beyond rendering my testimony entirely incredible. Still, part of me wants only to inflict on the reader a taste of the grisly profanity to which I regrettably exposed myself, as if that stigma’s power could be diluted through communication.
Ultimately, I aspire to serve a greater cause with this manuscript. There may come a time when people as a whole will be prepared to confront forces and beings that operate in hideous defiance of all we now take for granted. On that day, a record like this could prove useful in the titanic struggle that would ensue. I can hardly dream how, but my written observations might eventually provide some ingredient in a benevolent process to preserve the earth for life as we know it.
But that will be long after I am gone. |
Life as I knew it ended when I reentered that foul library. I should have taken more time to think; I would have gone home, maybe to return another day. I mentioned before that the feeling in my chest had stopped; now I believe that was the equivalent of being released from an initial, probative grasp. At the time, I didn’t pose any threat to secrecy—I had not yet witnessed the depths of Chaparral Heights.
Once again, the glass doors whispered open to grant me entrance. But this time, the air inside was noxiously altered, reeking like the detritus of a fish cannery sloshing into an open septic tank. I thought of all the books—how the stink would undoubtedly seep into the fibers of their paper and bindings. Somehow in the olfactory noise I remained numb to the threat of my own indelible contamination.
Again the library was empty, despite the gathering of vehicles in the parking lot. I supposed everyone might have evacuated to the garden area because of the smell, but I hadn’t noticed any people on my way in.
Whatever the case, my objective was to reclaim the items I had lost, including the two that had fallen from the book of poems. Although I had no idea what they contained, I felt entitled to add the folded paper and the Polaroid snapshot to my bizarre collection. After all, this was between Robert and me; it was all meant for me to find, and I had found it, fair and square.
I descended the main staircase to the lower level and turned toward the section where The Tunneler Below had been waiting before. Not surprisingly, I found that it was no longer among the ominous titles I had previously noted.
My last memory before the parking lot daze had been of a fluttering commotion in the air above and behind me, and so my eyes now began to patrol between the tops of the tall bookshelves, dimly catching details of the hexagonal pyramid ceiling.
Then came the stunning realization that all of the hanging light fixtures were subtly gyrating on their tethers like synchronized pendulums, slowly tracing tight horizontal circles in the fetid air. I watched the lamps intently and detected no sign of settling, and so concluded that the whole library must have been pulsating continuously under my feet!
The swaying overhead lights created a very faint throbbing of the shadows all around me. I was nearly hypnotized by the effect until sounds from across the room, at the elevator behind the main staircase, abruptly distracted me. I ducked into the darkest part of the aisle without thinking, and therefore could no longer deny that I was afraid. I scuttled crabwise around the base of the shelf structure, peering over the tops of books, hoping to see before being seen.
The source of the stench became obvious when the elevator opened. I heard two pairs of shoes crossing a section of hard floor and then carpet; then a choking new dose of horror assaulted my nose and mouth, wafting over me in a dense miasma from the direction of the elevator. I fought the urge to retch where I stood, as the loudness of such things can’t always be controlled.
There were voices: a man, simultaneously nasal and gruff, scolding a female subordinate who mumbled fretfully between his remarks. They were getting closer. I glanced behind me at one of the secondary stairways—but as the voices reached the staff desk at the center of the floor, I started to hear what was being said. The acoustics of the library must have amplified the sounds coming from that hexagonal hub.
“I saw you leave everything here on the counter. Now just take a deep breath, and retrace your steps,” the man said through a stretched veil of calm.
“I did that already!” the woman insisted, “I think we should check on Walden.” I felt the entirety of my skin tighten over me when she spoke my name. “Someone’s been helping him.”
“Just find the sample. She knows it’s in the library—that’s why she won’t hold still. I’m going back down before we lose the harness.”
“But if Walden—”
“The custodian will handle Walden. Find that sample, and don’t leave the building!”
She fell silent. My mind raced. Both of us listened to his footsteps treading to the elevator, heard its doors open and close, and then endured another concentrated wave of billowing odor. I couldn’t make myself move from my hiding place; too many possible outcomes clogged my vision. But I didn’t have to make a decision; there was someone else in the library who did.
“Don’t move, Genevieve,” a grim, quavering voice projected from next to the men’s room. “I have what you’re looking for. Let me see your hands.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” her voice lost every trace of the meekness it had exhibited in the other man’s presence. “I know that’s not a gun—”
“And I know you’re not in yet,” he raised his voice, “which means you can be eliminated, like normal.” He made a throaty noise, and Genevieve didn’t have a quick response. “Now you’re going to step down from the desk, and I’m going to lock you in the ladies’ room.”
She thought for a moment. “You said you have what I’m looking for.”
“No longer your concern,” he asserted, his voice still cracking.
His words appeared to have some effect, but he sounded physically and mentally exhausted—probably unstable, I thought. It wouldn’t be a good idea to try sneaking around; in his state, he might take a shot at any hint of motion in the corner of his eye. I spoke up as clearly and non-threateningly as possible.
“Hello! I don’t want any trouble,” I called, creeping toward the inward end of the aisle, holding my hands in front of me, “I’m not armed, and I’m coming from over here!”
“Who is that?” Genevieve snapped in my direction. The gunman reiterated the challenge.
“My name is Emiel. I’m not with them! Here I am, right here.” I stepped from behind my bookshelf, into the ring of bare carpet surrounding the desk. Genevieve stood on the opposite side. Her head was turned to me, but the rest of her faced the direction of the gunman’s voice.
Genevieve was younger than I expected, and taller—but she might have been standing on the raised platform under the desk. She had excessively black hair, pulled and tied tightly at the back of her head with short, straight ends bursting in several directions from the lumpy knot. She wore glasses with thin, breakable-looking frames and lenses the size of postage stamps. I could tell by her spastic blinking that she was startled to see me.
She turned her head back to the gunman as he entered my field of view from the ranks of shelves by the restrooms. I saw the arched visor of his white baseball cap rotate toward me, his face hidden under its shadow, and my eyes traveled down his arms to the glinting weapon gripped in both hands. It was, for the moment, pointed at the floor ahead of him.
He started to address me when Genevieve seized on his momentary distraction and snatched something from inside her shirt. Quickly, she pinched it between her fingers, barked and spat out a couple of strange, garbled words, then slammed her fist down on the counter surrounding the desk. A piercing white light like a welder’s torch radiated from her hand, and she pulled back to hurl it at the gunman.
But he shot her, twice in rapid succession, like a machine. I saw his expressionless face in the light from Genevieve’s hand. Two thunderous cracks of gunpowder, fortified by the library’s cavernous interior, exploded in my ears from all directions and left them ringing. I saw two dimples dive into the front of her shirt and two dark spurts eject from the back. The shining thing slipped from her grasp and followed her to the floor, and immediately there was a sustained flash of blinding brilliance that forced my eyes to squeeze shut. Everything went dazzling red through my eyelids as I crouched down, my hands and forearms feebly sheltering my head.
The gunman grunted in frustration and then stumbled against something. “Stay where you are!” he snarled desperately, “If you’re not one of them, then you have to help me!” My traumatized ears perceived these things through a tinny, whistling interference. I blinked again and again, willing my eyes to register their normal range of color and contrast. His shape approached me through the shimmering ghost-world of my reeling retinas.
“How did she do that?” I staggered to my feet, stupefied, holding onto the edge of the hexagonal desk. Suddenly, large hands grabbed onto both of my arms below the shoulders and jostled me sternly. He seemed anxious to explain himself, but all he could do was exhale despondently in my face. His alcoholic breath momentarily displaced the stink of the surrounding air, and created a new pocket of worry and doubt in my mind. People don’t get drunk and bring firearms into libraries unless they’re severely disturbed.
And yet, there was something familiar about his haggard frustration. He could have been on the same twisted road as I was, only further toward the end. Driven to these drastic, violent measures, he seemed to have a better understanding of his role in this dreadful scheme than I had of mine. That and his automatic pistol were good enough arguments for showing some sympathy.
The other man had told Genevieve that I would be “handled” by “the custodian.” My predicament was in deciding which prospect was less terrifying: making a run for my car, possibly through a hail of curses and lead, then into the waiting clutches of said custodian; or following this pickled vigilante into the vortex of his unknown crusade—most likely involving a ride down the elevator, into the vile, belching underground.
Once again, I hesitated and the decision was made for me. I was being shoved across the carpet, stumbling through bleached corridors of colorless books, until we stopped where he had left his supplies. A bag of glass bottles was roused from the floor; it knocked me off balance as he swung it over his shoulder. The bottles were full, and exuded a competitive aroma of their own: gasoline.
“What do you want from me, man?” I pleaded, “What is this about?” We were moving again, and my feet began to hit harder floor which I recognized as the elevator alcove behind the main staircase. The rotten smell was, of course, stronger there, and I thought I heard something like the turning of wheels from inside the unfathomed elevator shaft.
“Stranger,” he called me, “you picked the wrong time to show up. If you really don’t know what’s going on . . .” he hooted with a sardonic chuckle, “This is a declaration of war. That girl—Genevieve—she wasn’t part of the plan. I’m sorry about that. We’re going to call 9-1-1 right after this.”
I grimaced. “I don’t want any part of—”
Behind the elevator doors, a heavy mass lurched to a halt. There began a commotion of whooping, pounding and scratching as if a mob of enraged baboons were about to be loosed on us. When the doors slid open, the renewed stench was relatively easy to ignore.
My eyes had recovered to an unfortunate extent; what came next was unquestionably more upsetting than the callous duel with Genevieve had been. The terror in the library was escalating by orders of magnitude, skewing into unreal dimensions.
Their ruckus stopped appallingly quickly as they turned to face us, three of them—identical triplets, stooping like pinkish apes in the fullness of nudity, dilated pupils dominating the irises and bloodshot whites of their eyes, their chins glistening with drool. The rest of their bodies were smeared with filth of indeterminate origin. They must have been at least middle-aged, with receded, graying and matted hair, and dirt-stained lines in their faces—all three of which contorted into scowling, teeth-baring battle masks as they charged at us, shrieking furiously.
The man in the white cap hastily drew his weapon and sprayed a resounding but erratic volley at the advancing trio until the gun locked in its unloaded position. The fiend on the left, busily swiping and snatching at the air in front of him, clasped his throat and collapsed to the floor in a fit of wet, hacking coughs. The one on the right caught two slugs in the abdomen; he stopped in his tracks and hovered his clawed hands over the wounds until they began to stream blood. A groan of thwarted rage ascended through his frozen grimace as he stared at this painful irregularity, then stumbled against the wall and folded over his knees.
Meanwhile, the one in the middle had pounced forward and latched onto my legs, causing me to fall over and precipitate the domino effect on my gunslinging companion. The attacker buried his face in my calf and I felt his teeth trying to get a large bite of muscle. I yelled, grabbed two handfuls of his greasy, knotted hair, and pulled with no reservation. There was a ghastly sound like moist Velcro coming undone, then I was staring at ragged bits of flesh attached to the bundles of hair between my clenched fingers. He released my legs and reared back, groped at the raw scalp on the sides of his head, and let go a squealing cry that was very much like that of an infant—terrifyingly so.
With his hands plastered to his head, he briefly regarded his fallen brothers, made a few tragically innocent-sounding vocalizations, and then saw my cohort expel the clip from his gun. When it hit the tile floor, the defeated goblin bolted to his feet, slid one through a slick of blood, and dashed messily around the base of the main staircase, out of view from the alcove. I heard him gallop up the stairs, using more than his feet for traction. Then came two jarring impacts as he shouldered his way through the glass doors, and out of the library.
Everything was still for an uncertain moment, then the elevator doors started to close.
“Forget him!” the man ordered, as if I looked eager to chase the fleeing maniac. “It’s now or never!” He scrambled over me and bounded to the elevator, thrusting his arm in between the closing doors at the last possible moment. They reopened, and he turned and looked at me from the doorway.
He loaded a full clip and pulled the slide to chamber the first round. “Well?” His load of firebombs weighed heavily on one shoulder; he seemed too tired to be so motivated. My eyes were too stunned, before, to realize how grizzled and unkempt he truly was. He had probably spent the last week in the clothes he was wearing, and the graying whiskers around his chin were far beyond stubble. I could not have guessed what served as his source of energy for this mad incursion.
The one that had been shot in the gut was still moving, barely. Air sputtered softly through an exit wound in his back, under the ribcage (I’m not a physician, but it seemed lower to me than human lungs should have been located). His forehead was mashed against the floor between his knees, his face shrouded by a tangled cascade of hair. Whatever his anatomy, and regardless of his initial ferocity, he was gravely injured and pathetic to behold.
“Who are these poor bastards?” I asked the man in doorway. “I don’t think they understood what just happened!” My eyes locked on his drooping face as I gathered myself to my feet. He leaned against the jamb, preventing the doors from sliding shut, and didn’t answer right away.
Then, avoiding my eyes, “I’m real sorry to ask, since we just met and all. It’s not right, and I wish it didn’t have to be done. God knows I wish this thing never started, and for that matter, this town should have never been built. But we’re too late to change any of that. All we can change is what comes after.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out my plastic bag from Arrow Trail Park, complete with its original contents. He met my gaze briefly and tossed the bag to me; I caught it clumsily in front of my knees. Then he turned the gun around and held it by the barrel, out for me to take.
“All you gotta do is cover me. If you don’t help . . . I won’t make it back.” There was no question in his voice, but he seemed to think twice about whether it would be much loss.
I looked again at the pallid, shuddering form of the doubled-over triplet.
“What’s down there?” I vainly demanded.
He caught a burp in his throat and squinted at me. “Whatever it is, it sure stinks.”
His arm fell dejectedly to his side, the pistol hanging backwards from his slackened grip like a hammer that had pounded a million nails. A serene little smirk came over his face; but rather than give him an air of undaunted humor, it made him look morbidly complacent. For a split second the expression sharpened, betraying a smoldering hatred that overruled both his reason and his fatigue. But his features quickly settled back into the tired, cold-blooded indifference I saw when Genevieve was gunned down.
“What was your name again?” he asked casually, like someone about to sign an autograph.
“Emiel . . . Walden.” I stood there for what seemed like a long time.
“Alright then.” He pushed himself away from the jamb, allowing the doors to move in a few inches and withdraw again. “Just tell them it was Chuck Ogden who did this. They’ll figure out why, if they don’t already know.”
I squeezed the plastic bag in my hands, felt the texture of the book’s pages, and then a mousetrap was triggered in my head. “Ogden—like Marine Ogden?”
Chuck’s icy expression broke unconsciously, automatically, at the sound of that name. The gun fell from his fingers and startled him, and he ducked his face down behind the visor of his cap. We both looked at the floor, at the gun and the blood and the bodies, and at our shoes.
Then we looked up at each other and asked, “Do you feel that?”
The pulse of the library, at first barely indicated by the hanging light fixtures, was now strong enough to be felt through the floor. Every couple of seconds there came a vibration like rolling friction, as if some great millstone oscillated below, grinding a baleful cadence within the earth.
“That’s no earthquake,” Chuck said, reading my mind. I secured the plastic bag in my pocket and raked my scalp with my fingertips.
He kicked the gun to me through the edge of a blood puddle, dragging a red trail across the tiles to rest against my foot. I was just about to kick it back when a shattering crash rocked the library from above us. A galaxy of glass nuggets showered over the sides of the main staircase, and throughout as much of the library as I could see on either side. The elevator shimmied and Chuck lost his balance; he faltered backward and fell to the floor. I heard at least one of his bottles break inside the bag.
“I can’t wait for you any more,” he said, and watched me passively through the narrowing space between the elevator doors as they came together and closed.
Standing alone in the grisly aftermath of Chuck’s assault, I looked out past the staircase and listened. The library appeared to have been liberally seasoned with giant salt. Nothing happened for a few seconds, but soon I heard something sliding through the litter of glass fragments on the floor above me. There was another moment of stillness, and then came sounds whose accompanying images I am glad I did not see.
First was a violent, sucking rush of air, as if a huge, slimy toilet plunger had been pressed down and ripped away from the floor. Then a disgusting noise of chewing and squirming, like an orgy of banana-sized maggots feasting their way out of a gelatinous carcass. These gratuitous analogies do not faithfully represent what I heard, but rather the effect on me; in tandem with the putrid atmosphere and human brutality I had already absorbed, those sounds pushed me over the threshold into visceral panic.
I pivoted on my feet and vomited—loudly—into a potted plant in the corner of the alcove. This was not just the heaving of a sick stomach; through the deluge of gastric effluent, I screamed.
When I was done, breathlessly propping myself up in the corner, I felt it behind me. My watering eyes peeled open to their widest, at first unwilling to see anything except the joint of those two walls. My knees started to shake. Then I thought of Chuck’s gun on the floor. In a moment of giddy desperation I shoved myself away from the walls and turned with my head ducked low, seeing only the tiles immediately around my feet. But the pistol was gone, and so were the bodies, dragged silently away in the direction of the smeared blood.
My knack for hesitation failed me, and the oblivious reflex actions of my eyes and brain colluded against my better instincts. I looked. |
| The rest is a necessarily grotesque narrative that could justifiably be disregarded as crude dumpage from a hateful imagination. Still, I owe it to Robert to record my experience and commit it to the future, along with the pages from his journal and from The Tunneler Below. But I’m keeping the newsprint and its viscous smudge, to which I credit the temporary preservation of my life (and the resultant propagation of this manuscript). To explain the reason, I must now descend to the insane nadir of my testimony, describing the encounter that shriveled and deformed my living spirit into its current, terminal state. |
Chuck’s pistol was farther away on the floor, out of reach, straddled by two converging swaths of gore where the bodies had been pulled across the tiles. I doubt the firearm would have been of any use, even if I had had the presence of mind to lunge for it. The blood trails came together where the tile ended at the carpet, under the main staircase, under the festering bulk of a creature whose mere appearance paralyzed me like a venomous bite.
In a controlled environment, and with a mighty strain, a professional biologist might dribble forth a few tentative remarks of a taxonomical nature; but I am without the luxury of such objectivity. My perspective is irretrievably biased—I must admit this, if I am to salvage any credibility—and what I write now is as much for my own edification as anyone else’s.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have an understanding of the beast beyond the exquisite, primal fear known only to cornered prey—that stark, searing, cruel acknowledgement of being utterly finished; knowing that all you can do is be ripped apart, and feel every bit of it, until you feel nothing ever again. A slow, drawn-out version of this is the wretched state in which I’ve been dwindling ever since that day, when I tapped my last reserves of strength for the crazed trek home . . . .
But that is a separate story, and I won’t allow it to draw me away from this one. No more stalling, or begging for suspension of judgment on my sanity.
It was “the custodian,” I have no doubt. Custodian—usually a euphemism for janitor, referring to one who maintains a clean and safe environment. A strange choice of words.
It resembled a churning bladder of membranous, ink-black meat that had been butchered with a crowbar and reconstituted with a waxy emulsion of gallstones and mucus. Its surface features were constantly stirring, disintegrating and coalescing, wandering and mingling without pause—and never fully obscuring its horrendous interior, a seething storm of tissues and fluids that only a lunatic poet would seek to depict in words. The thing swelled and compacted, shifted mass between its regions, intermittently lurching, quivering and flexing like a disembodied stomach struggling to digest a dogfight in progress.
What it did then was loosely comparable to standing up, but looked more like the sprouting of a stygian forest: hundreds of ropy, wobbling appendages emerged from underneath and lifted their canopy of amoeboid corpulence away from the floor. At the ends of these “legs” were chitinous stumps, split vertically on the sides, reminiscent of cloven hooves. They shuffled and fidgeted randomly, seemingly independent of the whole. A few of them tapped against the floor as if observing the difference between hard tile and soft carpet.
For the few seconds I spent watching, I was in a dissociative trance, not fully realizing that I was present in the same scene. The end of that delusion came with unbelievable swiftness, when the custodian sprang at me in a dark, hurtling blur. I was bowled off my feet by a crashing wave of clammy, winding entrails that slammed me against the wall and pinned me flat, powerfully squeezing and pushing until I thought either the wall or I would burst under the pressure.
Its next aggression was something I will not recount in detail. I will say only that I endured a thorough and painful corporal violation, and will never again be able to have any common bodily function without being reminded of that outrageous defilement.
But my injury came at a cost to the custodian, I report with a shred of satisfaction. In its ravenous zeal, it failed to recognize that I was protected. My friend Robert Coyman—and, I suppose, Chuck Ogden—had saved my life in advance.
A pocket of air opened by my hip, freeing my hand to move a little. The slimy, almost liquescent flesh of the custodian began to shudder, first around that empty space, then all over. It released me and greasily withdrew itself a short distance, allowing me to collapse on the tiles and regain my breath.
The aggressor’s allergic throes were a loathsome spectacle of which I fully approved. Preoccupied with its own discomfort, it continued to shamble backward, bloating and puckering, dropping polluted pieces of itself to the floor. Several of its appendages broke from their roots and writhed on the tiles like decapitated snakes. Then it was the monster’s turn to be sick. An inflamed gash tore up the side of its body, and out surged an odious torrent of diseased innards and melting human remains. The entire floor of the alcove was converted to an abattoirish swamp, crawling horribly with individually animated debris from the thing’s gut.
I pulled the plastic bag from my pocket and held it at arm’s length toward the custodian. It shrank a few more feet away, next to the base of the stairs, but seemed unwilling to leave me alone completely. Hyperventilating badly, I tottered up on my feet, grasping for ideas the same way I gulped the air. Through the plastic at the end of my arm, I saw the circled lines of “The Green Deeps,” and frantically cast all my remaining hope in a humiliating attempt to recite those words, like some kind of sorcerous exorcism.
This irrational and corny reaction betrayed in me the same trite, primitive superstition I had disdained in others for most of my life. Having performed the ludicrous incantation with no visible effect on the custodian, my dry gasps broke into doom-laden sobbing. In defeat, my memory traced the path of my Chaparral Heights exploits, including the vicarious experience of Robert’s journal. Only then did I think of the stuff on the newsprint, and what its significance might really be.
My terror-palsied fingers fumbled to unseal the bag, and instead tore it completely apart. The poems dropped unceremoniously into the foaming slurry at my feet, and were apparently lost. But when the wad of newsprint fell after them, a fantastic thing happened.
As a kid, I was a regular viewer of a TV program called Mister Wizard’s World. The title character, a baritone version of Mister Rogers for an adolescent audience, performed educational feats of science with household materials. One of the more elementary but visually exciting tricks was to touch a bar of soap to water, the surface of which had been sprinkled with black pepper. The pepper would scatter outward from the soap, indicating the disruption of the water’s surface tension.
It was similar to that when I dropped the newsprint. But there wasn’t just a surface reaction on the bilious ooze; the whole volume of it, clean to the floor, parted like the biblical Red Sea in an even circle around my crumpled catalyst. The bog flung itself away so vigorously that the air around me was agitated in the rush. Some of the slime forced itself into the cracks of the elevator door, out of sight, and the rest retreated in oily streams and awkwardly tumbling, splashing lumps, out of the alcove—toward the custodian itself, as if reconsidering secession from its bowels.
On the cleared tiles at my feet lay both pages from The Tunneler Below, amazingly unstained by the custodian’s wicked refuse—they may have acquired some of the newsprint’s repellent essence while they had been confined together.
As soon as I had bent down to retrieve the items and returned upright, the custodian was out of sight. More glass rolled over the side of the staircase, and I heard the upstairs rubble being disturbed again. That was all I observed of the thing’s departure—but I prefer to imagine it was chased back out of the library, and then down the street, by its own stampeding regurgitation.
The floor was left with a chunky coating of biochemical residue, and Chuck’s engrimed pistol next to the carpet.
I first smelled the smoke as I was turning the weapon over in my hands. I looked back to see wisps of sooty shadow eking through the frame of the elevator and gathering against the ceiling of the alcove.
“I won’t make it back,” Chuck had told me, and I took his word for it. I’m no hero. Alone again, anxious to conclude the day’s trials, I turned my back on everything but the exit.
My car was at the top of the main staircase, upside-down in the middle of the shattered doorway. I crawled around it, over a cutting layer of crystalline gravel, and never stopped to look inside. Through the yawning overhang of the entrance, the last light of day glowed scarlet from the west; dusk had already claimed the parking lot. The lamp posts stood cold and inert over the parked vehicles, the owners of which were likely being consumed in Chuck Ogden’s unleaded inferno. I took a deep breath of refreshingly uncorrupted air.
As I got to my feet, the ground shook under me and a sudden gale of hot wind exploded against me from the doorway, pushing me onto my toes. Handfuls of glass skittered past, almost reaching the asphalt. The floor must have collapsed inside the library, exposing its clandestine substructure; through the roar and crackle of flames, I heard the breaking of lumber and the squeal of twisting metal. The other sounds were only in my head, I continue to persuade myself. |
| I walked all night with the sticky gun in my hand, back the way I had come by car through Chino Hills. There had been no one to stop me in the Chaparral Heights twilight as I trudged down like a tattered soldier, through the residential blocks on the east slope of the hills. I passed slowly under street lamps, between dozens of silent houses with unlit windows. Every shadow contained another stalking custodian, another trio of feral berserkers, another chasm in the earth. I clutched my newsprint talisman to my side and muttered incoherent prayers into the darkness until I finally saw the driveway at the fence. Then I ran as fast as I could, back across the little bridge to Carbon Canyon Road, where I turned north and kept running, running until I could no longer see the sneering mouth of Chaparral Heights over my shoulder. I kept running until it became impossible to breathe, and for the rest of the night I walked. |
It’s been weeks now, and without the courage to return to that place, I am left with a bewildering array of fractions and their evocative but unknowable correlations. When I start to guess at what might have been under that library, I become lost either in self-delusion or despair. I still want to think nothing could have survived that fire; but an irrepressible part of me has constant visions of things to the contrary, of god-like beings so massively powerful that their sleeping movements shape the earth under our feet, that civilizations and species rise and fall between the capricious tides of their dreams . . . .
Frankly, I try not to dwell on questions anymore. I have accepted that I’ll never know what was on the folded piece of paper, or the Polaroid photograph. I’m never going to understand the importance of the circled lines of poetry. And I will never find out if this manuscript gets into the right (or wrong) hands. Wondering is a supplemental torture I can do without.
A week or two after my return, I made another discovery. The wad of newsprint had been sitting idly on my desk since I first got home, catching my eye every time I passed through the room. But all those days went by before it occurred to me that the crumpled paper may have been more than just a rag for picking up resin.
Between two layers of wax paper, I spread the mangled sheet on the table and pressed it flat with phone books. Then a mottled blue-green impression of a hand was blearily apparent in the center of the page, where the substance had penetrated the thin paper and made it translucent in the most concentrated spots.
The Inland Chronicle was a local tabloid-size newspaper that I had heard of but never read. What I had was about two thirds of an inside page, torn loose from a double-wide sheet. At first glance, neither side of print contained anything of conspicuous value; it was mostly stacks of advertisements, with a few small articles and continuations tucked alongside to fill the unsold space.
The print date was February 15, 1994—nearly a month after Robert left his fateful message to me and went missing. I’m still baffled as to how this fits into the timeline. Did he sneak back to Arrow Trail Park after his disappearance, hide the plastic bag, and vanish again without alerting anyone? Could it have been someone else? Always more questions, never a straight answer.
There was something to be found, but I found it too late. If I had examined the newsprint when I first obtained it, I might have been better equipped to change the outcome in the library. But at least now I have an idea of why Chuck Ogden did what he did. |
Bizarre suicide gouges landmark
By Joe Moran, staff writer
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CHAPARRAL HEIGHTS—Early yesterday morning, 22-year-old resident Marine Ogden ended her life by driving at high speed into the southern wall of a plateau known locally as “The Mesa,” causing a landslide. Buried under tons of earth, the vehicle was not discovered until city investigators surveyed the damage several hours later.
“It’s not only a terrible tragedy for the family,” said Franklin Tong of the Chaparral Heights Public Works Committee. “The impact will be felt by everyone in the community.”
Several feet of ground were lost from the overlook at Arrow Trail Park, directly above the crash site. The park will remain closed to visitors until public safety is assured by temporary modifications to the boundary fence. Further investigations will determine the structural integrity of the adjacent cliffs, and whether any homes are in consequent danger.
One neighbor, who asked to remain nameless, argued that Ogden’s suicide was an act of extreme Valentine’s Day depression due to a failing romance. This has yet to be substantiated by a secondary source. The Ogden family was unavailable for comment.
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I doubt the holiday had anything to do with it; rather, I suspect the nameless neighbor was involved in covering up the truth. So much of the story remains hidden to me, and I don’t expect to learn anything new from this point on. Yet, from my disjointed mosaic of scrap knowledge, I have developed one optimistic theory that gives me a meager hope for the future:
In that dark place where the stones perspired a sticky dew, where he moved like an animal through vanishing water and heard the voice of his dead grandfather, Robert Wilson Coyman found what I choose to believe is an untapped stronghold of human resistance—our next “hiding place,” as he mentioned on the first page given from his journal.
“One of us will find the other,” he wrote. But this is not to be. Robert sensed in me a capacity to comprehend and confront something that is, in reality, vastly beyond my scope. I am in no condition to step outside my door, let alone reunite with my friend on the next level of his unearthly adventure. Each day I wake from my haunted sleep, I am less than I was the day before.
Something was removed from me to make room for my companion. The stowaway occupies the place where I used to find my conscience, my will to fight what I know is wrong. The stowaway reclines there and laughingly whispers to me in my own voice.
It tells me the custodian isn’t finished with me, and never stops thinking about me. It says no one will ever read my words and believe them to be true. It tells me I belong to Chaparral Heights, and, one way or another, Chaparral Heights will have me.
When the stowaway becomes especially chatty, I disassemble Chuck’s pistol and scrub each part with an old toothbrush. The pistol is very clean now, and working smoothly despite a lack of lubrication. I’ve been practicing with it unloaded, finding out which position is most comfortable. My favorite is under the chin.
If you believe nothing else of my story, believe this: I left my apartment only one time, to withdraw cash from an ATM to pay for my food deliveries. Other than that 20-minute errand, I’ve been here and nowhere else.
After the first couple of days, my answering machine started receiving calls from work, asking where I was. It took me some time to formulate what I would tell them, since the truth was out of the question.
Finally, I called back with my prepared statement in hand—I had actually scripted it on paper—
Emiel Walden answered the phone. |
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