The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities Read online

  He attained the expansive porch, bouncing his case alongside him as he ascended the stone steps. The door was open and he walked into the pink-tiled foyer and looked down both side halls and then into the balcony-lined room ahead. No! It cannot be! Among the guests, mingling, laughing, holding aloft a glass of white wine as he made his way through the crowd—Spettrini! The man was elderly, bent, but he moved like a boy, quick and alive. Greyson had heard he’d drowned, or been torn apart by a bear... but there he was… or… wait. Was it him? Greyson practically sprinted into the room, his case bouncing behind him, only to be accosted by a large man in a powder-blue caftan who slid from a side hallway and blocked Greyson’s view. The man’s brows and waxed mustache were bright white. “This way,” he said. “You’re late, you’re late.”

  He put his hand on Greyson’s shoulder, grabbed the case with his other hand, and they trotted down a short hall and into a couch-lined side room that ran the length of the house. From the ceiling hung a strange, bulbous chandelier, moist and glowing with reflected light. All about Greyson was a gurgling, rushing sound, as of strong currents of flowing water. As he was hastened along, in an adjacent room he spied Haskell, his former apprentice, apparently fresh from his television appearance. He was seated in an overstuffed easy chair, surrounded by revelers, cradling in his arms a small rabbit whose head lolled loosely—its neck had been broken. Haskell was disconsolate, his mouth slack and his tear-streaked face a shade of red one associates with profound sun-burns. In the next room was the television host, laughing, all gums and teeth, each arm around the waist of a skeletal brunette whose spine jutted from her back like the teeth of serrated knives. Also in that room sat three shivering, wet old women wound tightly in towels, being tended to by paternal, mustachioed sheriffs whose bulging stomachs tested the integrity of their uniforms. And the convenience store kid chatting up a portly blonde in a garish pink pantsuit. And the actor he’d missed on the talk show, waiting for the bathroom, one hand gripping a white handkerchief into which he was gagging loudly, the other grabbing desperately at his crotch in a manner befitting a child.

  Finally, Greyson was brought into what he took to be the great room. At its easternmost edge was a vast stage, ringed with chaise lounges, ancient chairs, thrones, couches. From the center of the ovoid chamber, a stone column, thicker than four stout men, rose ceilingward; from it curved great balconies of white marble. Monstrous red curtains obscured the windows; the ceiling was high and far away, a pink and blue blur. But the room was empty of people.

  A voice spoke, echoing around the room. Come back to me, it said. I have so much to teach. There are passageways to be conjured, paths to be struck through the walls that confine us to this world. Into the room through an archway, side-by-side, strode the television host, Haskell, the convenience store clerk, an old woman in a soaked nightgown, and a sheriff. Their clothes melted away as though consumed by invisible fire, and they squeezed together shoulder to shoulder and elongated, horizontal creases forming across their bodies as they became fingers that reached out for Greyson as a section of the column split off and bent to form a great arm. There were blue veins surfacing and pulsing at the narrowing wrist. The arm attached to the fingers, the front-most section flattening into a palm.

  As Greyson fled, the walls and ceiling began to vibrate, fluttering like sheets. A terrible shriek tore through the chamber and a figure appeared at the entrance toward which he was heading. It was the woman from the hotel. Freed from her yellow-windowed booth, she was flush with color: rouged cheeks, scarves of brilliant yellow, shining purple, leaf-green. Her scarves rippled as though in a stiff wind. She was ragged, aged, buffeted by time, and absolutely beautiful. “Run,” she said. “Get out of this house as fast as your feet can take you.” The walls shook and a terrible roar cycled throughout the house like a demon train on an intricate track. A set of white spikes rose from the floor and another sank through the ceiling. They sank into the woman at her neck and up through her left leg. A glut of blood bubbled at her mouth.

  Greyson ran. He reached out his hand to touch hers as he passed her. Her skin was warm. There was a jolt, as of static electricity, and as Greyson exited, the chamber began to contract around him. He bounded down the red hall (which was now damp and tinged with purple), reached the porch, bounded to the walk, and ran down the center of the street. The roar was deafening now, the street lit nearly as bright as daylight from behind him. He turned.

  White and black hairs were sprouting on the roof of the house, crawling up like a profusion of snakes. The dormer windows went white, and eyeballs, blue and blazing, rolled down into view like window shades. The front door widened, moldings splintering and falling to the ground. It bent into a grin as on either side the half built-houses began to rise like jagged arms, sending clouds of dirt into the air. The road began to split and crumble. Greyson turned again and ran as Spettrini pushed himself out of the ground and the house that was his head ascended into the night sky.

  following you home

  Ten minutes before the countdown began, Merrill was depleted. He had worked all day, and only begrudgingly had he let himself be persuaded to forego an evening on the recliner with a blanket and a book, an early bed. He knew only Dave, Myrta and Bellamy, not very well at that, just from work, not even in his department, and they were circulating among the smaller groups, entering and departing conversations with an enviable ease that was alien to Merrill.

  The party was within walking distance of his rented house, though, and he could leave at will, at any time, and the weather was mild for the first of the year. But once there, he’d somehow managed his way into a prickly argument in which, unarmed with facts, he rapidly began losing his footing. Dispirited, aggrieved, he wondered at how he might extricate himself, when the countdown began, someone shoved a champagne flute into his hand, all glasses went aloft, and Merrill ducked through the crowd and slid out the door, not before grabbing a malt beverage bottle and three nutmeg logs from a tin.

  He buttoned his jacket as he bounced down the hedge-hemmed staircase and into the street, where revelers in puffed-up coats and scarves were dispersing from the city’s downtown ceremonies. Shoving the bottle into his pea coat pocket, he kicked at unwound streamers and clumps of confetti dampened with snow. The flurries that had been coming down all afternoon began to turn into a steady snow that covered the city like static.

  As Merrill crossed the Main Street intersection he saw, crossing opposite and parallel with him, in a throng of teenagers, what he first thought to be a man in gray carrying a stained, mottled white balloon on a thick string. Looking again, he saw that the balloon was the head of some impossibly tall thing with a deathly pallor and a slender, muscled neck. The crowd around this freakish apparition seemed to not take notice of it at all. Merrill saw nothing of the man’s body, and at first thought the thing to be a prank, some kind of outsized macabre puppet surrounded by his handlers, but as the crowd reached the curb, just as Merrill reached the curb opposite, the thing broke away and shambled in his direction. As it passed under the stoplight, Merrill saw the thing’s features full on, and his stomach tightened like a fist. It bore no resemblance to any earthly creature he’d ever seen. Everything was…wrong. He broke into a jog and at the next crosswalk he bolted back across the street and ducked down an alley that led to a parking lot and a side road. Then he walked between two houses to the long road that led to his house. Turning, he could see the crowds on Main Street and…there it was, that pale head bobbling just below a streetlight, swiveling, searching.

  Merrill took a circuitous route home, doubling back, looking behind him frequently and with great apprehension. Across the sky like a rocket shot a keening, a terrible, echoing shriek, like some monstrous cicada, it was a desperate, searing expression of hungry desire, tinged with equal parts outrage and mournfulness. Merrill stopped still, everything inside him clenching now, his teeth pushing against each other. Across the street in a boxy raised ranch he saw two silhouettes
appear in a yellow window, black countenances tilted upward toward the sky. Then the light in the room was extinguished, dropping the silhouettes into grey obscurity. The cry reached a searing pitch, then trailed off with sounds like fever-sharp knife edges sliding across one another. The silence that followed was somehow worse, for he knew the cry would sound again, and so it did, not a full minute later, louder and longer this time, causing the muscles in his throat to vibrate, his testicles to pull up into his body for protection, his body shrink itself into a fetal crouch, his hands splaying on the sidewalk like talons.

  When it stopped, he ran full-bore to his house, there it was, just ahead, low and blue, the familiar orange glow in the kitchen window. He entered, keys onto telephone table, up to the bathroom where he washed his face and regarded himself momentarily in the mirror. It’s okay. It can’t find him. He lost it. It was maybe just a man, a deformed man, harmless, celebrating the new year in a city known for tolerating its freaks and its oddballs. Maybe it had been a puppet, or…or a hologram…a New Year’s prank.

  He climbed into his rumpled bed and hit the light. Silence, but for the clicking of the pipes. He pictured that horrific thing, stalking the darkened streets, searching for him. The house creaked, a settling sound, normal. But Merrill’s heart jumped, and then beat so hard he wondered if he might have some kind of attack. Did the light change just a touch around the corner from the doorway to the bedroom? Was that a light footstep, tentative, cautious?

  Merrill turned on his light and leapt from his bed. He strode about the rooms, chest out, brave of face, turning on all the lights, then to the front door. It looked somehow crouched, poised to burst open and admit unimaginable horror. Strangely, Merrill suddenly felt calm, settled, at a strange ease.

  He remembers the bottle in his pocket. He pulls it from his jacket, tossed over the back of a chair, drinks, lemons, sweet and boozy, fizz roiling at the roof of his mouth. The cold from the outside fills the room and turns it icy blue.

  He angles the recliner to face the closed door. Considers. Up and opens the door. Sits, facing the staticky rectangle of street and snow-capped hedge, lit by a streetlight. A few leaves skitter by, chasing and teasing each other, relics from a dead and buried autumn.

  His eyes blink quickly. More slowly now, more closed than open. He pictures the hideous creature emerging from the thicket like a mantis, gaping black mouth with teeth like a serpent's, dripping with mucousy venom, fingers without bones wriggling with perverse anticipation, eyes deep in fleshy caverns, kaleidoscopic, ruby and rot. Its gnarled torso and limbs are cloaked, he imagines, in blankets that once swaddled bloated and desiccated corpses, sticky with sweat and suppurations, torn and clotted. Its smell is septic, toxic, tinged with a blasphemy of citrus.

  And yet, what appears in the doorway, what steps with a long, twig-thin, gnarled white leg, over the transom, what approaches on white, serrated pincers is worse than what he saw on that snow-speckled street, worse than what he had imagined, worse than what he would have been capable of imagining. He greets it with a hoarse, rising shriek of laughter. As it deliberately disrobes him, its horrible head tilted like that of an animal, he gibbers and jabbers and weeps. It plucks his lashes and places them gently, delicately, in his eyes. The pain is unreal. He blinks, rapidly, water filling his eyes. He sees the thing swimming in salt, wavering, leering. Only then does it begin its real cruelties. And after all the monstrous ministrations, all the penetrations and the whisperings, the promises and the betrayals, the lashings, the hoarse imparting, in a nigh-impenetrable accent, of ghastly truths and ghoulish prophecies, it does the worst thing, the cruelest and most horrible act. It leaves Merrill alive.

  no abiding place on earth

  -Mary, don’t forget your cudgel.

  Mary mutters, how could she possibly forget, grabs the knotted, leaded blackthorn cudgel from the umbrella stand, knocking Daniel’s cane to the floor. He shouldn’t have said anything, he knew she was in a snit, and of course she knows to bring the cudgel, but…but a father’s job is to err on the side of protecting his daughter if he can. And for his trouble, she snaps at him. Mary, little Mary-kins, not so long ago just a doll-faced girl, curious and giggly and adoring, now hardened, weary-eyed, humorless. She slams the door behind her as he pushes himself up from the chair, groaning like a man much older than his 54 years, bends slowly to pick up the cane, stabs it back into the stand. He pulls back the curtain, scans the barren treetops. Their stripped limbs wave in the wind, a skeletal convocation pleading for an offering from the frowning, furrowed sky. Tendrils of mist, the ghosts of snakes, curl around their trunks. The telephone wires bounce gently like recently deserted tight-ropes.

  There don’t seem to be any of them out there, not now.

  From the other side of the hedges he hears the car door slam shut, the whinny and purr of the engine. She is okay. She will be okay. The cudgel will be enough.

  November, that brown and brittle season, has swung in hard on the heel of Halloween, and most days linger in a dusky malaise from start to finish, suspended in a bluish-grey solution of dread and dead leaves. Last night the wind kicked up hard, barren limbs smacking at the house like dried husks of hands. The windows rattled and shook in their casements and the cat drew close to Daniel in his easy chair, her chin in the crook of Daniel’s arm. When the wind yelped around the corners of the house, the cat whimpered, pressing closer. Daniel hoped fervently for the power to stay on.

  Most of them keep their distance when the lights are on.

  It started with the power outages. The first was in mid-September, resolved quickly, unremarkable. Another two days later, lasting nearly three hours. The next week brought four separate outages, over seven hours without electricity each go-round. Flashlights, candles, early to bed. Charge your devices while you can. When in doubt, throw it out.

  Another call to MassGrid, a subsidiary of The Global Electricity Group PLC. The unhappy union of squirrel and transformer, said the voice somewhere back in the phone’s speaker, distant, like a call from the outer reaches of the universe. That’s what you said every time I called last week. Are the squirrels committing mass suicide? Silence for a beat, a rote apology. We’re sorry sir. Crews are out and active, doing all they can.

  Uh huh.

  The scratching at the windows starts up. The doorknob jiggles. The muttering, the guttural rumbling, the sighs at the windows, at the doorjamb.

  After a time, the house awakens with a hum and the lights flicker bright, too bright, blinding, then back to their usual weak dimness. The things retreat to the trees, beyond the reach of the streetlights.

  The outages still come, two or three a day, lasting hours.

  It was early October when Daniel first saw them. He was out for a walk, and he chanced to look up high in the grey sky and one was descending, some kind of strange owl, plucked bare. Pallid, knobby breast; flimsy, webbed wings dangling from twig-like arms, it flew only with a great deal of exertion. When it was a few yards off it began to coast, spreading its wings wide, and lit in a copse of trees, its long-toed feet scrambling to grasp a gnarled branch. Twigs snapped and a flurry of leaves and…and the trees were full of the things. Daniel took a few tentative steps in their direction, then clasped his hand over his mouth. Their heads resembled those of elderly men, wispy white hair, wizened, slack mouths curtained with pink, blistered dewlaps. One turned its hooded, sagging eye in his direction. Then the others did the same. They coughed and wheezed and began flapping their sad wings as if to launch. It sounded like the smacking of slackened cheeks when someone rapidly shakes his head back and forth.

  Then they did launch, all of them, at once. Daniel dropped to his knees, covered his head. They swarmed above him, flapping and wheezing and muttering. When they had passed, he turned and saw a boy—the Bernier kid, probably—running down Prospect Street, the horrid flock flying low above him, bellowing and belching and screeching. The front-most creature swooped down and grabbed the boy by the collar and left sleev
e of his shirt. He cried out as he was lifted into the sky. The flock ascended into the clouds, the boy struggling to release himself, to punch at the horrid thing that carried him, small legs kicking uselessly at the sky. Daniel stared after them, helpless.

  Since they came, everything deteriorates with alarming rapidity. The cat litter dampens and clumps into concrete. The milk curdles minutes out of the refrigerator. The bread, fresh from the machine, sprouts green bruises. Peaches erupt with black blisters and crumple, flies bursting from their rotten cores, buzzing madly. Tea cools before it reaches Daniel’s lips. He cracks an egg and the yolk is black gelatin. The smell is rank, gag-inducing.

  Even the bulbs in the lamps don’t have the reach they once did.

  The worst thing is that there’s nothing about the creatures on the news. Daniel watches the two local channels, scans the daily paper, which the carrier, brave soul, still somehow manages to fling onto the doorstep every day but Sunday. There are three houses on the short dead-end street, three including the one he shares with Mary. The other two have shed their tenants and whatever belongings they could fit in their cars. Daniel wonders where they’re going and whether they’ll get there. He doesn’t know how widespread the problem is. He wishes they’d talk about it on the news.

  Mary’s been gone four hours, the longest stretch yet. The local markets are locked up tight or else busted open, trashed and looted, and she has to go further and further to find canned food and simple provisions.