1.
The baby was emitting his familiar thin cry of hunger from the nursery. Tina rushed to prepare a bottle of formula. Some dribbled on her arm, the color and consistency of a malnourished man's semen. She unthinkingly licked the stray drop off her wrist, grimacing at the fetid taste.
"Here you go, Hally," she said, plugging the rubber nipple into the infant's mouth and stilling his wails. "Though how you can stand that stuff is beyond me. Yuck-o!" Ten-month-old Hal Bumsen only looked at his mother with disconnected bemusement.
Tina narrowly missed tripping on the dog as she exited her son's room; he'd followed her unobtrusively from the kitchen. "Helmut, get out from underfoot. Honestly."
Helmut, a handsome male dachshund with a russet coat and long regal nose, was her husband's pride and joy. Lance had bought the puppy nearly three years ago while they were vacationing in Colorado, almost on a whim, after they visited a pet store. There was something exotic, he had said, about the breed, plus they were little and easy to keep. They didn't have a very large house, after all, being just engaged--she was a seventeen-year-old with the ink barely drying on her high-school diploma; he sold paper door-to-door. Both wanted kids, and a small dog like this was perfect for children--they could grow up together, Lance had insisted--and a young couple on a shoestring budget.
The dog followed his mistress with a properly subservient air, yet she recognized buried in it the proper mien of nobility that recalled the now-obscure German nobleman whose name he proudly wore. Tina checked the watch-face on the inside of her wrist and saw that she still had ten minutes left on her cake.
It was Lance's favorite: Duncan Hines' butter recipe golden. She was baking it to celebrate his almost-in-the-bag promotion to the district sales manager for Mineral Point Paper, Inc. It was one-thirty-five in the afternoon, and he had promised to call her and let her know as soon as everything was approved. The oven-timer wasn't working, so Tina had set her watch alarm to go off when it was time to take the cake from the oven. The long-awaited call came just as there were two minutes left on the countdown clock. "Oh, crap," she muttered with no real malice as she crossed the room and hooked the receiver neatly on its second ring. "Hello?"
"It's me, honey," Lance said. "Littmeyer just gave me the good news, official-like. I'm the new d.s.m. I start next week."
"Wonderful!"
"You sound like you were doubting me, babe."
"Not for a minute," she laughed. "Never you. I might not think much of, you know, company politics--"
"Politics be cursed. I was the most qualified. The job was in my pocket. You know what this means, right? More desk time, less hoofing--which means more time to spend with you and Hal. Especially Hal. Between double my old salary and fewer hours, you'll be able to go to work again, so we'll have two incomes. Sock a little away for Hally's college fund."
Tina's watch beeped. "Oh. I-I have something that needs my attention. 'Fraid I'll have to let you go. And congrats!"
"Thanks. See you in about three hours, then. Bye."
Tina said goodbye to her husband and hurried to take her cake out of the oven. It looked fine...until she turned it out onto a plate and nibbled at a small piece that had flaked off during the transfer. It was foul-tasting and rubbery. Quickly, as if to confirm her fears, she sampled a much larger bit. It was so sour and hard to chew she immediately spat it out into the plastic garbage sack that hung on the cabinet door.
The batter, she thought to herself. It's old. She dithered around for the empty cake mix box, which had been thoughtlessly cast to the floor about an hour ago when she'd begun this hideous failed culinary experiment. She couldn't find an expiration date stamped anywhere on it, only a cheery announcement that the box was made of recycled paperboard. "The whole thing tastes like it's made of recycled paperboard," she said aloud, irritated.
Hal began his accustomed wailing from the other room, his formula bottle no doubt drained. He probably needed burping, attention, a lullaby, likely. Tina was on her way to the baby when Helmut interceded and began his own plaintive, hungry yipping.
"When it rains!" growled Tina and began to search the cabinets for a tin of Old Roy. None was to be found. "Looks like you ate the last of it yesterday, champ," she told him, "and I won't be getting to the store until tomorrow, when Daddy gets paid and I have some grocery money to burn." She passed the hard, vile-tasting cake on the way back to the kitchen door, and an appealing thought blossomed in her mind.
"Here you go, Helmut," she said, plopping the dish of unappetizing cake before him, and watching him savage it with abandon. "Enjoy." It seemed a shame to waste all that effort, plus three expensive eggs and a whole half-cup of costly margarine, by simply chucking the cake into the trash--why not kill two birds with one stone?
As Helmut gobbled the last remains of cake, Tina and Hal settled down in front of the television. She alleviated his gas bubble with a few pats to the back, then rocked him to sleep as she watched her afternoon soaps.
2.
She must have dozed off, she realized, because she saw it was close to four and the sky was tinged with dark clouds, the harbingers of evening on daylight savings time. Hal was still asleep, so she set him carefully on the couch and stood, massaging the crick from her back. She noticed Helmut had also fallen asleep in the kitchen, the crumbs from his meal scattered about the floor, the dish knocked askew. She spoke his name and stepped forward. He didn't seem to hear. She spoke it a little louder and touched him. When she shook him she realized with a start that he was gone.
Oh no, I've killed Lance's dog, she thought, her eyes welling up with tears. It was that cake. That horrible, disgusting cake. Was it that old batter? It must have, I don't know, produced toxins or something. She fumbled to recall how old it was; she had inherited it from her mother when she moved in with Lance, she knew, like some grotesque heirloom, and chances are it had been elderly even then. She didn't know how long a dry mix could keep. I should have thrown it away, she thought, when I realized it was bad. Should have pitched it. I didn't. And now...Helmut's dead. Because of my stupid, stupid thoughtlessness.
There wasn't time to bury the dog properly, she knew. Not now. Lance would be home any moment, and it was getting dark out anyway , and cold....
Cold. That was it. The Bumsens had a freezer in the basement, one of the large old-fashioned steel boxy ones, which Lance used chiefly to store the remains of the deer he and his buddies killed over near Lake Koshkonong every couple of months, plus that couple of hundred pounds of hog his uncle sent them up from Buford, Missouri last spring...he only infrequently visited the wintry depths of that monster, and would never know...she could store Helmut's corpse within it, bury him tomorrow while Lance was at work, and then absolve herself with a clever cover story about a careless hit-and-run driver....
Yes, that was what she would do. Quickly checking on Hal to make sure he didn't awaken--she was nervous enough and didn't need his bawling to further distract her and make her careless and slip up, for she couldn't afford one iota of crap!--she wrapped Helmut's body in makeshift butcher's paper comprised of newsprint and old torn-up brown paper sacks. She carried her victim to the deep-freezer and inserted him in it, as tenderly as if placing her child in his bed, between the hanks of venison and some fat sausages curled in plastic wrap. She then slammed the lid down, shuddered--be it from guilt or the chill, she couldn't say--and bounded fervently to the top of the stairs, smacking the light switch with the meaty palm of one hand.
3.
She saw Lance off to work the next morning at eight, begging her stiff and trembling body to not betray her secret. Lance had asked about the absent Helmut the previous night as they sat down to stuffed pork chops and potatoes with dumplings. Tina had played it coyly, feeling very much like the murderous vamp in some black-and-white movie they played on AMC--all I need's the cleavage and a long cigarette holder, she thought. She said that he was probably visiting a girlfriend on the next block. "You know, the Pekingese? Looks like somebody whapped her in the puss with an ugly stick?" She turned up her pretty nose, like a pig, with her thumb, and made faces at Hal, who was seated in his high chair and exercising his few budding teeth on a fat dumpling. He laughed and slapped his hand in his plate, spraying buttery sauce all over. "Male dogs do that, you know. He'll come dragging in, spent most likely, by morning."
"All right," Lance said dubiously. "I just hate the thought of him out there by himself in the cold."
Tina stopped with a forkful of chop to her lips and decided she wasn't that hungry. She managed, however, to fight down the rest of her dumplings and potatoes. They felt as rubbery going down as had Lance's celebration cake.
After her husband left, Tina went into the house. She prepared a bottle of formula for the baby and left it standing in the fridge for when he awoke. She put on heavy cloth gloves and a light jacket, along with her wide-brimmed straw gardening hat. She fetched a shovel from the tool shed. Finally, after checking on Hal twice and putting it off as long as possible, she went down to the cellar.
She half-expected to find the dog gone--perhaps discovered by Lance, suspicious of his wife's trepidation and big wall-eyes, and surreptitiously removed, maybe taken with him in the car, leaving her to go mad trying to figure out how a dead dog, let alone a frozen one, gets up and walks away...but Helmut was still there, in his paper cerements. They were stiff and thick with frost. They had adhered to his fur. Tina had no desire to peel them away anyhow. It would be easier and cleaner to not have to see Helmut's face.
She chose a place at the far corner of the yard, near a copse of trees, where the ground looked soft; it still took a good while, though, to bury the dog, and then fill in the hole and to conceal it in such a way as to not look so much like a grave. She covered the bald, chewed-looking plot with leaves and grass cuttings when she was done, then thought to herself that she should leave some kind of marker, an honorarium on the spot...but an inconspicuous one that only she would know the significance of.
She chose a large stone that was orange with rust on top and had a smaller pink stone imbedded in it just off its center, like a diminutive heart. She had picked it up from a site where workers were breaking rocks one day and, when she got home, had tossed it in a pile, along with other fair-sized stones she'd collected with the intent to someday start a garden and use those rocks to form a border. This sedimentary stone, she felt, would make the perfect grave-marker. Lance might notice it, but apply no other significance to it that his wife's fondness for the odd and the pretty. Certainly he wouldn't connect the token with the passing of the beloved family pet.
Hal was crying when she got inside, and she hurried with his bottle, not sure just how long the poor little fellow had been deprived. She held him, fed him and rocked him to sleep.
"Mommy had dirty business to do today," she told her baby as he sucked complacently at his bottle. "That's why I'm so late in feeding you, darling, and I'm sorry. You sort of lost your brother yesterday. Now Daddy can't know that Mommy made a boo-boo and his doggie is now sleeping with the angels. So I'm going to tell him a little white lie and say he died because a car hit him. I would never have done anything to hurt Helmut on purpose, you know that. But...it just isn't...it's bad to lie...but sometimes the truth is worse...so you bend things a little to make it look good. Do you understand?" She looked at the baby. "No, of course not. You're still pooping your Pampers. You'll learn all about lying someday." She switched the baby from one shoulder to the next. "When you're old enough to have a girlfriend. That's generally when most men first learn about lying." She laughed harshly at her own rueful joke.
Tina went to the store that afternoon as she had planned. She purchased everything that was on her list, then, almost as an afterthought, grabbed four golden-lidded tins of Old Roy--two chicken-and-egg and two gourmet recipe. "Yes, I know it's an extravagance," she told Hal, who sat in the shopping cart child seat blissfully teething on a bag of carrot slices (Tina figured the plastic, come cold from the freezer, felt good on his painful little gums) "for a dead and buried mutt. But don't you think Daddy will believe the story more if Mommy comes home with the food and discovers there is no Helmut left to eat it? It's irony. You'll learn about it in school. Lends the right note of credibility to this whole mess, doesn't it? Don't you think so?"
Hal only goggled up at his mother, the corners of the bag of vegetables looking decidedly worn and tooth-marked from his gnawing.
Tina arrived home and put the groceries, including the tins of dog food she'd bought as a red herring, in the cabinet, placed the baby in his crib with his formula, then went to the bathroom. She checked her fingers. They had been minorly blistered from the morning's exertion with the shovel, and there was one minor cut on her pinky. If Lance asked, she'd pass it off as a mishap she'd had with a knife while cutting onions for dinner. She began a rice-and-mushroom casserole, using onions, deftly covering up every track she'd left behind, leaving nothing to chance. It was simmering by the time her husband got home.
With some tears (convincingly prompted by the onions), she told her husband that she had seen Helmut dead on the highway near their house while coming home from shopping. It was likely a careless driver who'd made no effort to stop. No, she saw no one; it had probably happened hours before. The bitch of it was, she'd just bought dog food because she remembered not seeing any yesterday in the cabinet. (The empty cake mix box was taken with her in a plastic sack and disposed of in a dumpster behind the market; the cake pan and dish washed and dried and put back in the cupboard. Nothing left to chance; no suspicion aroused.)
Lance seemed surprised that Helmut would be killed out on the highway, as he knew better than to venture out that far and into busy traffic. Tina said she thought so to. "But a male dog with a female scent in his nose, honey--he won't think straight. He probably forgot his good judgment." She said she called animal control to remove Helmut's body.
Lance only picked at his casserole and, though it was Friday and he usually watched television far into the night on weekends, excused himself and went to bed at seven-thirty. Tina could hear him sobbing. She made up a bed for herself and Hal on the couch. Best to let him grieve privately...and at the same time, perform penance for her sin on the uncomfortable, thin cushions with the hard spring boring into her ass.
4.
Tuesday afternoon Tina had a visitor--a man in a set of navy-blue coveralls and a hardhat who introduced himself as Lester Namron from the North Shore Water Commission.
"You'll have to excuse me," Tina said, suddenly self-conscious of her open-toed sandals, her shabby sweats and tee, and her long dirty-blonde curls done up in a faded rag. "I was, uh, doing some house-cleaning--" she indicated the dustpan and broom in her hands-- "and it would go faster with the vacuum, but I can't use it because it makes too much noise, and my son is asleep."
"Quite all right, madam," Namron assured her. "What I have to say is quick, then you can swiftly return to your chores and your boy." Namron had an angular face and a prominent nose that gave him a distinguished, older air, but Tina didn't think he was any older that 32, 33...35 at the very outside. His short beard and eyes were both the same lustrous shade of black. His long hair was tied back in a thin braid.
"We've been receiving complaints about the water quality in the area. It seems there is a leak in the main someplace along the line introducing raw sewage into the supply. If left unchecked, this could render the local potables...well...unpotable, you see. We'll be needing to do some digging at several sites in the area to find the break over the next few weeks, and some of these sites are located on private property. One of them is in your backyard, Mrs. Bumsen.
"No need for concern, ma'am. We'll be as unobtrusive as possible. We only require the digging of a few small test holes...."
Tina realized then that the sewage company's digging could uncover Helmut's grave, and her heart cinched up with ice. She might have to dig up the body and replant it somewhere away from the site...or perhaps burn it, someplace.
"Well, thank you," Tina said to Lester Namron, "for letting me know. Gosh, all kind of nasty things are getting into the ground these days, huh? Pretty soon we won't be able to trust anything that comes out of the kitchen faucet. Folks'll be urinating in containers and straining it through special filters soon for their nourishment, like Kevin Costner in that water movie, mark my words. Good day, Mr. Namron."
"And good day to you too, Mrs. Bumsen," grinned the water company workman affably, showing a mouthful of pearly teeth. Tina shut the door rather hastily, and realized how rude she had been, but she didn't know how long she had before she was found out. She'd told Lance the body had been removed by the city. He couldn't know she had buried Helmut out back. She thought Namron had said they'd be digging on her land within the next couple of days, but she'd only been half listening. Her mind had been full of that dreadful, rubbery cake.
Checking again on the baby, she found her gardening hat and gloves and put them on as she made her way to the shed for her shovel. However, when she arrived at the site of the grave, she was surprised to see that it was already dug up. The dirt had been strewn every which-a-way. The hole was empty but for a shallow pool of sickly-smelling groundwater that had a greenish-brown tinge.
Did they begin the digging already? Tina was puzzled. No, they couldn't have--I'd have seen or heard the machinery--or noticed the workers if they just used shovels. And why send a man from NSWC to ask permission to dig in my backyard if the workers had come and gone already? Makes no sense!
What really made no sense, however, was the presence of smaller puddles of the same fetid brown-green water leading away from the hole...like
--animal tracks.
5.
Tina hurried back into the house, realizing only after she'd entered the back door that she hadn't had to turn the knob to admit herself; it was already standing wide open. She was certain she'd shut the bugger when she went outside to dig up Helmut's grave. That's when she saw them: the same drips and tracks she'd observed at the hole in the far corner of the yard, plus something else--a fetid stink. The smell increased as she progressed through the house. It reminded her of when she and Lance had traveled up to New York for Woodstock '99, and she had to use the bathroom. When she entered one of the row of Porto-Sans they had set up, they had been so foul-smelling and mud-caked they sickened her. She had opted to pee in the nearby woods instead.
She realized then that the reeking horror was intent on reaching the nursery, and broke into a run so fast she uncoordinatedly banged her shoulder against the wall and sent a bolt of pain through her left arm. Cursing explosively, she barreled down the hall and discovered with horror she was too late.
Hal's crib was empty. The sour stench of feces and urine hung in the air like a shroud. There was dark muck--grave-dirt mixed with sewer water--all about the bed. In it were dog-tracks--except Helmut had been barely fifteen pounds, and the prints she saw looked at least as large as those left by a dog four times that size.
He's grown, said Tina. There was no ration in the statement and yet it seemed perfectly concrete and reasonable to say.
The window was open, and the stinking brown-grey muck was crusted and drying in a slug's-trail up the wall, over the sill, and outside. Tina actually tried, gagging at the odor, to climb out the window herself, which was too small to admit her, before she came to herself and instead went out the bedroom door, through the front door, and around the house to the nursery window.
The creature that had been Helmut was waiting there for her, standing by the Rose's fence. The stench that rolled off his body smelled like a mingled combination of decaying flesh and rancid feces. He stood on his hind legs, and Tina guessed he now measured four feet tall upright. One eye was yellow and baleful. The other was obscured by mud and wet fur. In his forelegs he held Hal, squalling pitifully.
"You weren't dead," Tina told him. "You must have been close to death, but not quite there, when I stuck you in the freezer. The cold preserved that little spark of life."
The Helmut-creature cocked his filthy, misshapen head as if he understood.
"I buried you alive. And before you could fully thaw and dig your way out, you were exposed to something. A-a mutagen in the sewage from the broken pipe. I dug your grave right over the leak that man warned me about and never knew it."
Helmut snorted, then turned and lumbered away.
"Come back here!" Tina cried. She pursued the deformed mutant dog, who still cradled her crying child in his arms. "Get your ass back here with my baby, you creep!"
Helmut continued his progress at a relatively stable pace, not indicating he heard his mistress' voice, but not bothering to go faster. He wants me to follow him. Tina was as sure of that as she had been of what had happened to the dog; it was a total jump of logic, a wild assumption to make, yes, but it seemed solid enough to hang her hat on.
And he had her baby. That was the important thing.
As Tina followed the grotesque creature, she looked perplexedly at the street signs she passed. She was running down Coleridge...but she'd just turned off Riverwood, and Coleridge was clear on the opposite end of town. She passed another sign announcing this was Loesh Road--but there was no street called that on this block--or, she doubted, anyplace else in this town that she knew of. There was also no one milling about the yards in this neighborhood, which seemed odd--on a pleasant day like this, you could count on seeing at least one pedestrian, or a kid out on his three-wheeler, or even just someone walking out their front door to their mailbox. There was no traffic on the road--not even a parked car to be observed in the garages and carports along this strange new street. What in the world was going on?
She passed some shops--some of them she was familiar with, but they were arranged in a manner she didn't recognize, with stores and restaurants that were not in the same vicinity now neighbors...some she didn't know at all...several she knew by the shape of the building, but which boasted inexplicably blank white signs. One shop was painted a cheery sky blue. She'd passed the selfsame store while in town only a few afternoons ago, and it had been a dull brown stone. Had they had time to paint the whole magilla in only four days?
Helmut turned off Loesh, and when Tina followed him, she found herself at the tall gates of the local scrap iron and metal company. This was seriously off. The junkyard was at least a mile and a half from her house, yet she'd arrived there after running only a few blocks. She entered the scrap-yard and looked about. The machinery was silent. No workers were moving about or serving customers. The payroll office appeared deserted, which was odd for a workday. Helmut, Hal, and she were the only three players in this cluttered stage.
"Birth-mother. Here."
The voice was thick and throaty, as if run through a synthesizer. It echoed over the yard. Tina followed the sound of it up a wall of rusty scrap and old cars and saw Helmut hunched atop the mountain of old iron like a malformed prophet.
"Are-are you speaking?"
"Yes."
"You-you can't be. Dogs can't--" They can't grow to almost man-size, walk on two legs and kidnap babies, either...and as a general rule, a dead dog stays dead, and streets and landmarks don't arbitrarily move about, but it's obvious here that someone is playing fast and loose with the rules.
"You gave me bad man-food to eat, and it made me very sick," Helmut intoned. "Then you placed me in the cold-box--and then into the digging-place! I was so cold, and I wanted to cry, but had no voice. Then I was wet, and when I tried to cry, my mouth filled with bad water. I was drowning. Then I felt myself change. I could move. But I felt bad when I did. I knew you wouldn't give your birth-child bad man-food. If you had no man-food for birth-child, you would go to the man-food place and bring back some to your man-home. You would never give your birth-child or your man-mate bad man-food, yet you give it to me?
"What happened to me, birth-woman? You made me like this. I am sick and I hurt. Please make me better."
"I can't!" wailed Tina. "I didn't know that cake--what you call man-food--was spoiled...that it would make you so sick! I thought it would tide you over until I could get to the store--would you rather have been hungry?"
"Make me better."
"How?"
"Take me to the place where the man in white will put a sharp claw-thing in my bottom part...and give you the magic food-things that make me feel better."
Tina puzzled this. "The vet, you mean? Man! No shot or pill is going to cure you! If I were to walk in Dr. Baer's office with a--with you, looking like that, they would freak!"
"Freak," Helmut said, mulling the word. "That is what man-creatures call what they cannot understand. That is what I am...is it not?"
Tina opened her mouth, but couldn't find anything tactful to say. Yes, he was a freak; yes, she was responsible, but what could she do? She could put him out of his misery with a bullet, if she only had a gun. Lance would be upset, but he'd rather see the dog's life ended than the baby's--and this wasn't the dog he knew, not this abomination.
"Listen," said Tina. "You are in pain, and frightened, I realize that. But stealing my baby won't help you. You've only made me upset and much less inclined to help you." A crock, yes; even if she was willing, she couldn't do squat to help Helmut. At best, she could play dumb a while, wait till the dog's guard was down, seize Hal, run like mad, and hope the monster was unable to give chase. She could alert the police, or animal control, or the National Guard, though she full knew how insane and fishy her story would sound. "Please return Hal."
"I am sorry, birth-mother," said Helmut, "but eating bad man-food made me like this. Perhaps eating the birth-child will make me better. If it does not, at least you will hurt as much as me." The dog's unholy skin burbled and shifted, and Helmut cradled Hal to his chest. With horror Tina realized he meant to absorb her son.
Hal sank into the dog's stinking, semisolid body like it was made of quicksand. Rotted jellylike dogflesh covered Hal's eyes, nose, mouth, and hair, making him gag, cutting his protests short. He struggled, gasped, and choked. Soon only the pink tip of the baby's finger peeked through the muck before, it, too, was no more.
"Helmut!" Tina bawled. "You filthy, smelly freak! You bastard! You killed my son!" She advanced upon the mountain of junk. Something sharp--a rusty bit of wire, perhaps--cruelly cut her bare ankle, but she barely noticed the cheap, silvery pain. Helmut stood leering over her.
She thought of the illustration of the troll guarding the rickety rope bridge in The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which she often read to her baby before bedtime--now imbedded in this stinking devil's guts. "He's far too small for you to eat!" she screamed in a demented frenzy. "I'm so much bigger! Why don't you wait until I come trop-trop tropping across your bridge, and then you can eat ME!?"
Something thick and cold and slimy slid across her wrist as she scrabbled for purchase across the slick hood of an old automobile. It was Helmut's paw--only now more of a tentacle, and about twelve feet long, and its fellow was coiling about her waist. Her shirt had pulled up and exposed her stomach, and the pseudopodia felt fetid and moist, like a layer of rain-sodden dead leaves, on her bare skin. Her lips skinned back in a grimace. She screamed. Something foul--saliva, or some other secretion from the monster--dripped into her open mouth, and she wrenched her head back to spit it out. She jerked, and her foot slipped from its perch. She'd have tumbled headlong into a broken back or neck if Helmut hadn't been supporting her some twenty or thirty feet
[geez, did I climb that high so fast I didn't even realize how far up this thing went]
up.
"I think I should do what you say and eat you," said Helmut. "If I eat both the birth-child and the birth-mother it will make me better. If you do not make me better I will go and eat your man-mate when he comes back to the man-home."
Tina screamed and kicked fruitlessly. He wondered if the monster's appetite would never be sated. Would he go on eating people
[what people I haven't seen a soul since I left the house maybe he ate them already]
until there was no one remaining, in his search for a cure?
The monster's tooth-rimmed maw opened, revealing a tunnel lined with sharp white points. In its foul-smelling depths she heard her baby crying, still alive somehow in the layers of muck and filth. Dimly Tina wondered how on earth his mouth could take her entire body so effortlessly, with one bite--surely he wasn't that large? She felt herself slide across his teeth, knew the pain as they sliced deep red grooves into her flesh, was dissolved by unspeakable acids, observed bits of her flesh washed away in ribbons and bloody gouts, wondering why she wasn't dead as she inhaled the stink of the monster's unspeakable innards and looked upon their dripping blackness....
6.
"She is a neurological Sleeping Beauty, cursed to eternal slumber...but this was no poison apple or prick from a spinning-wheel needle that rendered her this way. No, it was a small stroke that began in the pons, a primitive glob of nerves located near the base of the brain that controls respiration and primitive muscle movements. She is comatose, totally paralyzed. An embolus developed that cut off vessels to this portion of the brain--" he indicated it on an X-ray--"that is thought to control dreams. You can see by the twitching of her eyelids that she is indeed in later-stage sleep, and has been since she was admitted."
The speaker was Dr. Norman Selter, head neurosurgeon at Kenosha County General. He had an angular face and a prominent nose that gave him a distinguished, older air, but he couldn't have been older that 32, 33...35 at the very outside. His short beard and eyes were both the same lustrous shade of black. His long hair was tied back in a thin braid.
"So in essence," spoke one of the medical students listening to Dr. Selter's lecture, "she is damned to dream forever?"
"She's been in this state for close to four years now," said Selter. "Maybe not 'forever', but in a dream that can be a lifetime. Have you noticed that what seems to be a day in a dream is, in real time, barely thirty minutes, or an hour? She might well be, to her own mind, collecting her social security pension and watching her grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up."
"Ah. So she has a family?"
"A husband," answered Selter, "who has since remarried and moved to a town outside Milwaukee. There was a son, but he was found starved to death in his crib. His mother was burying the family dog, whom she'd inadvertently killed by feeding it some cake--this we figured by examining the dog's stomach contents, though we aren't sure whether it was the mix that was spoiled or the amount consumed that was the end of the poor beast.
"We questioned Mr. Bumsen, the husband, and he informed us his wife claimed the dog had been killed by a driver on the highway. In actuality he had been frozen--the body, though somewhat decayed, did show signs of having been recently stored at a low temperature.
"Mrs. Bumsen was forced to have a hysterectomy after labor was induced at the seventh month of her pregnancy. Her ovary ripped, and the doctors believed it would be expedient to remove the other as well. Thus, they were unable to have more children. The dog, named Helmut, was thus a sort of surrogate older sibling, and his loss greatly concerned Mrs. Bumsen...especially since she had, in effect, been responsible for killing their 'son'. What she failed to realize was that she had a congenital condition--her grandmother, a sister of her mother's, and two great-aunts were forced to have complete or partial hysterectomies due to tumescent growths and irregularities. All died relatively young of heart complications or bleeding brought about by stress of childbirth.
"Tina Bumsen's brain was weakened by sprung blood vessels that could have gone at any time--this was one of the reasons for her ovaries being removed, as the stress of another delivery would have been the death of her. The labor of digging the hole, however, proved to be too much for her, and, thus, she collapsed. The hole had only been half-dug; the defrosting corpse of Helmut hadn't been interred yet.
"The irony is, she might still be with her husband if she'd been honest and up-front about the dog's death...and her son would still be with them. For the sake of their psuedo-son, their real son became a casualty of neglect before his first birthday."
"Can she hear us, sir?" inquired another student.
"I can't say. Think of a dream as a tangled, uncut path beside a paved thoroughfare. They both lead to the same place, and you can partly see cars and landmarks on the road as you slog through the brush, but the trees distort the light and prevent a clear view of anything.
"Logic in dreams is quite skewed. Certain individuals seem able to control their dreams--called 'lucid dreaming'--and innately recognize when they are dreaming and can control the action, or say, 'Hey this isn't right' and thus force themselves to awaken. Most folks, however, will readily accept the bastardization of physics and the familiar--they won't bat an eye if water flows uphill or the Leaning Tower of Pisa is standing smack in the middle of downtown Green Bay. Our world may filter through to her, but it is upside down and backwards, and the mind has reinterpreted the faulty data into something coherent and pleasing to her."
"Kind of like when I doze off watching TV, and I'm half-asleep but I think I'm awake, and can hear the characters talk and the soundtrack and stuff, but what I'm seeing in my head isn't what's really happening on the tube."
"Bingo. Subjective, manufactured reality. Her world is, for all practical purposes, a crazy-quilt lie."
"So if she wakes up, she will--?" a small, whey-faced intern squeaked, afraid to complete her question.
"She is a Hell of a living brain in a useless body who could conceivably continue to dream in her grave. A medical mystery kept alive by monitors, fed by a tube. She may live for all eternity on another plane, and still be when we have long since died and turned to dust. Or perhaps because of the nature of dream-time, her somnambulant life may cease in a mere handful of years.
"Let us only hope that the sun that shines on her dream-world doesn't supernova and burn out tomorrow...and that if one has to be trapped in a dream until the end of time, like a Virtuous Pagan sitting in Dante's Limbo whose only grief is that their Paradise had been built to the left of God's Hand, that it is a happy one."