Monstrocity Read online

  “Ghosts have been disproved.”

  “That’s what they want you to think.”

  Sighing, I screwed the lipstick tube to poke up more of its phallic tip. It looked like a big gun cartridge in my hands. I began drawing an inverted triangle around her pubic triangle. “You can’t compare heaven and hell with black holes and worm holes and...”

  “Get your mind off my worm hole for a minute. Do you think I’m stupid, is that it? You can’t wrap your little office boy mind around a new concept?”

  I glared up at her. I didn’t like it when the candle queen taunted me about working as a customer service rep for a netlink provider. After all, I spent as many days working from my home office in the next room as I did at the corporate office downtown. “It isn’t a new concept, Gaby. It’s an old, old concept. Like Ouija boards and rosary beads and holy books and all that dung.”

  “I tried a Ouija board once, with Maria,” she said defiantly, her narrow eyes more narrowed. “It said to me FIND US. It said to Maria WE WANT YOU.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that their own subconscious minds had directed the planchette. You can’t reason with any denomination of zealot. I didn’t want to make trouble; Gaby had a horrible temper and had already slapped my face one time for making a comment about a beautiful naked woman in a VT ad.

  “So let’s try it,” I said, as I drew a line down her shoulder, to the inside of her elbow, along her wrist like a razor blade revealing the bloodless purple meat inside her. She absent-mindedly opened her hand so I could draw the line across her palm, ending it at the tip of her middle finger.

  “All right. Let’s,” she said, still a bit icily.

  I had no shortage of candles in my apartment these days; we often made love to nothing but the wavering glow of their light. I watched Gaby, still nude, squat to place a candle on the floor in each of the eight corners of my bedroom, the depressed bay window included. Gaby had let me finish decorating her with my geometric pattern. A line extended down both arms, now, and both legs, so that it looked like I’d charted the flow of her blood, or spirit. I had finished my composition by painting a last line with the crumbly lipstick down the center of her face, from the top of her broad forehead, down her long handsome nose, to the tip of her chin. She looked like some primitive tribal priestess. The voluptuous goddess of a fertility cult. I couldn’t wait for this game with the candles to be over so I could make love to her looking that way.

  Gaby took her cigarette lighter, and began circling around the room a second time, hunching down to light each candle on the glossy faux wooden floor. I hoped she didn’t set fire to the curtains in the bay window, as I pulled my flannel bathrobe around me. Out of the warm nest of our bed, the big bedroom seemed chilly.

  “Do you have to say some magic words?” I asked, trying not to sound too facetious, testing her temper.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I took some of Maria’s disks out of her apartment after she died, when her sister let me go through her music; one of them has this on it, I’m sure.” Finished with the candles, she crossed the room to her pocketbook, dug in it for her palmcomp and a disk holder. In her voluminous handbag I glimpsed the small illegal handgun Gaby carried for protection; she had been raped a couple times. She found the items she sought, flicked the lid of the disk holder open and sat on the edge of the bed to thumb through the chips resting inside. “The red one,” she said at last, plucking out an unlabeled disk and feeding it into the side of the small computer. While she activated it, I glanced again nervously at my curtains.

  “You should look at this stuff yourself, some time, Topher – it may open your squinty little eyes,” she said, while whisking through the contents of her dead pal’s disk.

  “Your candles are melting.”

  “Yeah. I was right. Here. It’s a chant called ‘Ascending Mode’. There’s a banishing chant called ‘Descending Mode’. To conjure and enslave the demon to do your bidding, you read the entire Ascending Mode...but if you just want to have a look at it, you read the first half of the chant, and then read the first half of the banishing chant to close the window again.”

  “Got it,” I said solemnly, nodding.

  All eight candles fluttered. Shadows rocked on the walls like the ghosts of all our love-making. Gaby got up and moved to the center of the room, where she cradled the palmcomp in both hands as if it were some moldering tome bound in human skin. She smiled up at me with her wry little sealed-lipped smile, gazed back at the small glowing screen that under-lit her features a faint blue, and began to recite the formula.

  She either mutilated the chant, or it was supposed to sound like a person reciting backwards gibberish with their throat full of power cells and their neck cut. The palmcomp’s screen reflected in her dark eyes. And when she was done – nothing happened.

  She looked around us. I found myself doing the same. I even looked at the ceiling, as if I might really see a ghastly shadow writhing there across the plaster, or bony white arms reaching through it.

  “I must have mispronounced it,” she suggested.

  “How could anyone pronounce it? Do you want me to try?” I offered lamely.

  “Wait a second.” She touched some keys on the device. “Maria recorded herself reading some of these passages...”

  I edged closer to peek over Gabrielle’s bare shoulder while she accessed the contents page of Maria’s chip again. She had labeled the disk Necronomicon, I saw. She’d also stored some recipes on the disk, unless they were magic potions. Gaby went to a bookmark Maria had left, and opened it to a series of recordings of Maria reciting excerpts from this apparent spell book she had copied.

  Gaby clicked on ASCENDING MODE, PART ONE and then Maria’s face filled the screen. She had been pretty, but her eyebrows and hair had been shaved, and geometric patterns in glowing blue filament were embroidered into her scalp. They reminded me of my lipstick designs on Gaby.

  It was eerie seeing Maria’s disembodied head there, staring up at us. Was this where it had disappeared to? And then it began to speak.

  The utterances sounded no less garbled, no less twisted coming out of her mouth. I had heard nonhuman colonists whose native languages were more legible-sounding.

  When it was over, we both looked up again. Guttering firelight, undulating shadows ringed us and squirmed across our disheveled bed. Nothing.

  “What was it supposed to look like?” I whispered.

  “How the hell should I know? You, maybe. Maybe you’re gone, and you’re a devil instead.”

  “There’s no tricking you, huh?”

  “I better do the banishing mode anyway, just to close the portal. Just in case.”

  “Why not?” I said agreeably. I was glad to close up the whole experiment. Why contemplate the metaphysical when we were wasting good bed time?

  Gaby found the appropriate recitation, DESCENDING MODE, PART ONE, and played it. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed just like the same recording of Maria as before, but simply played in reverse this time. When it was finished, Gaby shut off the palmcomp and padded over to her pocketbook to drop it in, without first removing the red disk.

  “Oh well,” I said, shedding my robe and ducking under the blanket. I patted the mattress beside me.

  Gaby lit a cigarette from one of the candles before replacing it on the floor. She didn’t extinguish them before joining me, and we made love in the ring of their flame, shadows rippling across Gaby’s white skin with its priestess patterns.

  ***

  WHEN I AWOKE, several of the candles had gone out, the circle broken, and Gaby sat naked on the edge of the bed, her back toward me. I touched her, and her skin was cold.

  Without turning around, she said softly, “I did the ascending mode twice. Once myself, and then Maria.” She paused. “But I only played the descending mode once.”

  I wanted to sigh, but I was afraid to get her riled, so I suggested, “Play it again, then.”

  “It’s too late.”

&nbs
p; She twisted around a bit to look over her shoulder at me. I saw my lipstick tattoos had been largely wiped away during sex and sleep. Her smudged forehead looked badly bruised. Her nipples looked blurred. And in the murky light, I could just barely make out her heart throbbing in her chest. Candle light reflected on the clear pane.

  “Hey!” I said, sitting up in bed and taking her arm to turn her a little more toward me.

  The red, neon-glowing tattoo on her heart had gone out. That cavity and that organ were dark now.

  “What happened? Why’d it go out?”

  Gaby looked down at her chest dreamily, as if she might be still half asleep. Was she on drugs? She knew I didn’t approve of the drugs she took with her friends. Look where Maria’s activities had got her.

  “It just went out,” she droned. “It isn’t important.”

  “No? Well...hey...whatever. It’s your mutilation.”

  Slapping barefoot across the room, I went to take a shower, calling out, “Coffee!” along the way.

  When I got out of the shower, and poured myself a cup, I called out, “Gaby, you want some coffee?” But she didn’t reply. And when I went from room to room, I didn’t find her. Her clothes and her pocketbook were gone. All eight candles were now extinguished.

  ***

  FROM WORK AT the corporate office the next morning, I called the candle shop. A coworker of Gabrielle’s named Ramona told me Gaby had called in sick. I thanked her and buzzed Gaby at home.

  No answer.

  As I gave up on the call, a strobe flash to my right drew my attention to my window, a narrow fortress-like strip; enough to say I had a window, but not enough to distract my attention from work for long. Lightning again flashed over the city, like a rush of glowing blood washing through a giant’s veins. Rain pounded my pane, made the city ripple as though it were melting. Punktown was vast out there, even compressed in this limited frame. Towers seemed to disembowel the low-slung black clouds. Despite the storm, I saw fly-like helicars drifting between the looming structures. Lighted windows and holograph advertisements wavered like candle flames. A rumble of thunder, more felt in my body as a vibration than heard.

  A call from one of our clients drew my attention back to my monitor. He looked unhappy. I tried to look pleasant. He couldn’t access his own free netlink pages in our service’s site-building station in order to update them. I told him the station wasn’t down for updates; had he forgotten his password, perhaps? He snapped that he used a face recognition password feature, and he sure hadn’t changed his fucking face. He was not the first abusive client to make me wish I could use a computer-generated face in place of my own, like a mask. I hated having to look pleasant, bland. Better yet, I wished I didn’t have to work this job at all. He made me grateful for Gaby, who had entered my increasingly ant-like life to jolt a deeper rhythm to my heart. Even with her often volatile emotions, her weird interests. I’d rather be walking backwards downstairs reading incantations and staring into a hand mirror right now, I thought, than sitting in this cubicle staring at people who want to take their frustrations out on me. I’d rather be in bed, listening to the rain and thunder with Gaby.

  And where was Gaby now?

  ***

  I CALLED HER from home that night.

  No answer.

  I called the shop in the Canberra Mall again the next morning. Ramona seemed disgusted that Gaby had called in sick once again. I buzzed her apartment. No answer.

  I considered zipping over there at lunch, but it was too far to be a zip. Instead, directly after work I took a tube from my office block to an old shunt station, and from there rode a sparking shunt line to the tenement row where she lived, practically in the shadow of the mall where she worked.

  Was her door buzzer working? I had stabbed my finger into it three times already. At last, I pounded the panel with the heel of my fist. I started to yell her name, but choked it off when a disapproving or simply nosy neighbor poked his or her head out into the narrow, dusky hall. I couldn’t tell if it were a human or an alien, for that matter: the bloated-faced being was apparently tremendously obese, and either a light blue from some light source within its apartment or wearing blue skin makeup. Perhaps that was its natural hue. The being had no hair or eyebrows, and when we locked eyes it slowly withdrew back into its apartment. When its door snicked shut I gave a funny little shudder, and turned to face Gaby standing in her doorway, studying me. I audibly gasped. It should have amused her greatly, but instead she looked tired and preoccupied.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  A few beats. She looked past me, down the hall where I had been gazing, and then with a lazy half-shrug slipped aside to grant me entrance.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here. Just here.”

  “Well, why don’t you return my calls? Are you angry at me for mocking you the other night?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy doing what?”

  A few more silent beats. “Going into the net. Looking for more books like the ones Maria had on disk. I’ve been getting more interested.”

  “Well, I hope you don’t lose your job over it.”

  “My job isn’t important.”

  “Tell it to your landlord when you rent comes due.”

  “Did you just come over here to criticize me, Christopher?”

  I didn’t reply. I found myself dropping my eyes to her chest. She wore a too-large black sweater, black tights that nicely abstracted her curves, black Chinese slippers. If her heart tattoo had been fixed, her clothes didn’t reveal it to me. After our last time together, she looked like a window that had been painted black.

  “Do you want me to go?” I asked, craning my neck to peer past her into the next room. Her computer appeared to be on, judging from the odd low murmur I heard coming from there, and it made me curious about this new obsession of hers that was more important than her poor neglected boyfriend.

  “I’d rather you did,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

  I flashed my eyes back to her. I hadn’t really, really been serious about leaving. “What’s with you, Gabe? Are you angry at me, or aren’t you?”

  “I will be,” she said, but blandly, like a good customer service rep, “if you don’t respect my need for some occasional privacy, Christopher.” And with that, I saw her half-suppress a glance back at the next room. At her computer, and that murmuring.

  “What is so bloody important about this dung, Gabe? Huh?” And with that, I stormed past her like a petulant child to see what she was so absorbed in on her computer.

  “Christopher!” she snapped, like the old Gabrielle I knew, and I heard her start after me. “Wait! That’s none of your business!”

  I saw the monitor for several seconds before she eclipsed it with her black body and shut down the program. But what I’d seen had looked like a tangle of geometric figures; a spider web of curves and angles but without the obvious pattern of a spider’s web. It had almost looked like a complex street map. The murmuring ended before I could tell if it had been music or muffled voices.

  “Now I know all your secrets,” I teased her in an unamused tone.

  She turned to glare at me, still blocking the dead screen. “You’re an empty-headed ass.”

  “Goodbye,” I said neatly, and walked away.

  She called after me, “If you were more open-minded, I’d share all this with you.”

  I stopped in my tracks, then half looked back at her. “Make a copy of that program for me, then. Let me take it home to look at. Then I’ll tell you whether or not I think it’s worth being open-minded about.”

  One, two, three beats of hesitation. Then: “No.” Simply that.

  “Come see me if you’re ever so inclined. And you might want to go to work, too, someday, if you’re ever so inclined.” I opened her door, and repeated, “Bye.”

  I stepped out into the hall in slow motion, expecting her to call me back into the room.
She always called me back – if testily -- when I tried storming out after a fight. This time she didn’t call me back.

  I was in the hall again. Her door was closed between us again. For some reason I glanced at the door where that bloated blue face had peered out at me. The door was closed, but I almost felt eyes peeking at me through its surface.

  ***

  SOMETIMES AT WORK, for a change of scenery from the cafeteria, I took my break down in the parking garage in the sub-basement, where there was a row of snack machines along one clammy white-tiled wall. Other workers from other offices stood about like knots of people at a party, leaning against the walls or immense, tiled support columns. The parking area itself housed hovercars, helicars, and wheeled vehicles of every description, stacked one above the other above the other as if in bunk beds, to conserve space. I saw a car being carried along by a robot arm on a ceiling track, then being lowered and slipped into an available slot. People paid good money to reserve a spot. “Plot” might be a better word: the rows of cars were like metal caskets filed away in mausoleum drawers. Sliding right out for your convenient access. Public transportation suited my needs, and my salary.

  I purchased a coffee from a machine that sounded like it was grinding up a donkey in order to make it. The black liquid was bitter. I imagined it was fluid siphoned out of the suspended vehicles, then directed via hoses into the back of the beverage machine. In fact, I heard a distant patter of fluid dripping from one of them, like water from a cavern roof. The bad coffee made me long for the coffee shops at the Canberra Mall.

  Nearby, in front of a candy dispenser, two women who worked for another company in the building above us were complaining about the erratic behavior of their server; it had been opened up today and the brain had been found to be oddly swollen in its tank of nutrient solution. My own company also used a genetically engineered encephalon for its mainframe; I’d seen it a few times, convoluted grayish brain tissue looking green in its solution, appearing squashed in its rectangular, vertically-positioned four foot by two foot and six inch deep container, wires snaking out of the mass and wavering like plants in a bubbling aquarium. My brother once saw a badly wrecked truck which had been carrying a load of these big artificially-generated brains; he said they were seeping out the back of the truck, the green amniotic fluids running into the gutter. Anyway, I’d heard there was a virus going around, and these women were speculating that was what had caused their company’s server to perform strangely.