The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Darrell Schweitzer
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The moldy, humid smell was overpowering here, a scent he had enjoyed as a child but which now seemed oppressive, as if his throat were rapidly filling with cool, moist earth.
He coughed, suddenly feeling dizzy, and grabbed the side of a box.
A loud squealing and a nest of squirming, hairless baby rats spilled out onto the tunnel floor. Morgan stepped back quickly, mashing one of the pink, shapeless forms into the mud.
Morgan ran, then stumbled several steps before reaching a bare part of the wall past the boxes. He slumped there, trying to catch his breath. Alice was pacing directly over his head, in one of the bedrooms now, as if she were following his progress.
He could hear more distant noises, noises like whimpers somewhere back near the coal outcropping.
He’d gone out west looking for Alice, or someone like her. She had been a fascination since the first day he’d met her. She said it herself, though not in the way he might have liked: “You always sound like I’m some rare, odd stone you’ve picked up.”
“You’re different from any woman I’ve ever known. I’m just fascinated.”
“But I need you to like me for what I want to be, not what you want me to be!”
Alice would make him forget. Make him forget all the bad times. Like the night at the fraternity house, the night that got him into the hospital. “Rum and sleeping pills don’t mix! Morgan killed himself with thirty-six!” There was a loud banging at the door, he remembered, but he’d been having a lot of trouble with voices, and after awhile he had learned to ignore them.
She would make him forget his father’s phonecall, the call that came only a week after Morgan had entered St. Anthony’s Mental Hospital. “We can’t afford to keep you in that fancy place no more, Morgan.” The old man wanted to trade cars again. “Now listen, Bob Wilkins down on Long Branch just got back from that State place, and he’s a whole lot better. An’ it don’t cost nothin.”
Massive, brain-numbing doses of Thorazine, Stellazine, Mellaril; they’d make him a whole lot better, sure pa. Plus maybe a little bit of Congentin so he wouldn’t feel inclined to swallow his tongue. Three aides had to drag him away from the phone, like a puppet or an enormous, cast-off doll.
Alice would make him forget. He had been sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to hear the voices.
* * * *
Morgan slid down the tunnel wall and leaned back on his heels, his fist knotted against his mouth. The noises like voices had grown louder down at the tunnel’s end. He wanted to scream, run back up the stairs and capture Alice in his arms again, hold her and make her comfort him. He couldn’t do this for her.
Perhaps he did need her more than she needed him, but he was determined to give her something in return. “I’m sorry, Alice. Sometimes I can’t help the things I feel. I hate to use the word, but I was an…abused child.”
“Yeah. Well, there’s more than one kind of abuse.”
He had hugged her then, and she buried her face in his neck.
Now she wouldn’t hold him anymore. He could still hear her pacing over the tunnel. He slapped the wall of cool earth, hurting his hand. He needed to hold her. If there had been a post nearby, he’d have filled his arms with that.
She would make him forget stopping aides in St. Anthony’s halls, telling them he had damaged the plastic on his head and badly needed fixing. She would make him forget the dream he had a few days after his father’s phonecall. He is in a ward with dozens of patients, blank-faced babies and drooling old men, women in dirty yellow pajamas. A picture postcard from his parents: “Wish you were here.” Pointed and curled red cliffs on the postcard, yellow and purple spherical plants…
The last two boxes in the tunnel were unsealed. He recognized some of them as childhood possessions. Books, old books mildewed and rotted, the covers pulled off, pages falling into flakes, cloth going back to thread. The fetid remains of his old clothing, his cousin Louise’s toys, some of his own. There was just the head of a doll.
Morgan touched the doll’s hair, then noticed it moving and stared in fascination as the small nest of black insects shifted position on the pink plastic skull.
Looking closer he could tell it wasn’t Blue.
…There’s a baby in the corner of the hospital room. Playing quietly, now humming. Eyes the size of silver dollars, bulges in the forehead like two knobs. Its head appears to be unnaturally large…
Something scurried above him. Morgan jerked up his head, just in time to catch sight of a rodent disappearing into a rift in the stone-and-earth ceiling. He could still hear Alice’s pacing, seemingly closer now, and he suddenly wasn’t sure he could remember what she looked like; anxiety pricked the back of his neck.
He could see the pockmarks in the walls, the small craterlike holes in the floor, the ragged surface of the terrain—as if he were on the moon. He shouldn’t have been able to see so well in this part of the tunnel.
A low whimpering, more like mewling, erupted from the dark end of the tunnel, continued on a space, then died.
Then the night after graduation, the night his father staggered home drunk and started kicking Morgan, screaming at him, accusing him of a number of perverted acts, and Morgan didn’t, couldn’t fight back couldn’t say a word, the doll acted.
When Morgan went back to his darkened room, he discovered a pale light beneath his bed covers. Lifting up the sheet he found two glowing pieces of glass—Blue’s eyes. Then wetness on his leg. He reached frantically for the light switch.
Blue was lying by his foot, covered with blood. The plastic head was almost severed at the neck, and the doll was greatly bloated and yellowish. The enormous empty sockets seemed accusing as they gazed up at Morgan. He swore he could hear it whisper, if he could only strain hard enough.
That night he wrapped the doll in newspapers, walked down to the creek behind the house, and threw it in. It took a long time for the creek to carry it out of sight.
…The nurse bounces a ball, smashing it into the baby’s face. The baby screams. Why doesn’t she realize what she’s doing? She bounces it harder and harder; the baby screams and screams, its mouth stretching in agony, and still she strikes it, beats it, smashes the ball into the baby’s face…
Then Morgan could see the trail through the tunnel, a shallow furrow as if from something being dragged, with two small balled prints on either side.
There was a slight whispering sound, then several sharp cries. Rats scurried in the boxes behind him. Alice quickened her pace overhead.
…The baby bleeds from the nose, the baby’s arms too long, the baby with no legs, the baby hobbling away on its hands, dragging its narrow torso, whimpering. Morgan wants to scream, but is afraid of being punished…
Alice had changed since they’d come to Virginia. She was irritable most of the time; they argued more. She blamed him for her depression, saying she’d only come out here to please him. She preferred the dry air of Colorado to all this horrible humidity and rot. She complained of suffocation. Then the whispers, the cries, the whimpers began to take over the house, the voices he thought he had left behind here years ago.
As soon as they got into town they had driven up to his mother’s place. He didn’t really want to see her, but he felt he had to go there first. His father had died three years ago from a broken vein in his head.
“Did I ever tell you what it was like, havin’ you, son?”
“Oh, I always supposed it was just the usual way.”
He smiled conspiratorially at Alice.
“Not that usual, no sir!” She gestured expansively. “I had a fourteen-hour labor and the doctor was drunk. Family friend, and he was drunk, and scared as anything! Broke my pelvis bad, gettin’ you out, you being big, sixteen pound they said. Blood and all that over the floor,