CANVAS SEVEN: THE CAGE
I was reeling from Maura's dream for a long time after she told me. I'd gone over there because she thought I was having some kind of meltdown. I was, but...
She knew, you see. About the tats. It's a rare daugher that can't get her father to tell her what she wants to know, if she acts scared enough at the beginning of a week-long break from school, one wherein her Fairy Godbrother kind of looked like he was chewing his nails for kicks and hitting himself in the head with a hammer to get to sleep.
She had me up to the house on some pretext or another, some book or CD she wanted to borrow, I can't even remember. It could have been a movie, for all I know. Even as worn to a stumpas I'd gotten, I know people. I can tell when motions are being gone through, even with the best of intentions.
Maura knew. There in the kitchen, she told me the whole affair was the weirdest thing she'd ever heard of.
"Hopefully they stop," was her final word on the matter, mostly. "It's been, what, a good couple of months now and no more have come in? Maybe your Storyteller got tired. Maybe this whole thing is just your brain trying to make some sense out of an insane situation, which is, Schiya Myelnik--" She only ever said my whole name when she was trying to get me to listen. "A sane response."
At that salvo, I was forced to the conclusion that it was time to retire to the back deck for one of Maura's delicious Marlboro Lights, and told her so. Her witchy violet eyes sparkled. "I thought you quit. Yes, you can burn one, Desperate Housewife." She was already handing it to me.
We got out onto the deck and I slid the door shut behind us. The night was breezy, full and heady and wet with that great vast purple-green sage-and-honey smell of the northern Pennsylvania woods, the stink of Pan himself grinning through his green beard like Samuel R. Delany, come down to spirit me away on the Wild Hunt, away, away, away from spitting in the face of closure, and the endless chase that never led to a kill.
That was a different kind of wild one, hun that guys like Maura's Dad went on their whole lives. They ate shit, and they liked it. I didn't know if I could pretend to such nail-head toughness.
I wanted more.
The deck door slid shut again. I hadn'e even heard her go in and come back out, but I heard it when she opened both beer bottles with a disposable lighter. Whhh-CHUCK. Whhh-CHUCK.
"Boddington Stout," she pronounced. "Wait for the gas to settle or you'll choke on the foam."
I did so, then took a nice slow swill of that icy cold beer so dark it looked like roofing tar. It was like drinking the smell of the forest, and my nose and throat and guts rejoiced. She was looking at me. It was almost too dark to tell, but she was looking.
"You gotta meet my Justin," she half-whispered. "I bet he could get a story out of all this."
I smirked, tearing myself away from the stars that didn't seem to stay in place when she was around. "What's he look like? Is he hot? I--" But I could have kept talking. The slap didn't conn ect with my face.
"You touch my man in dream, you better wake up and apologize," Maura cracked in a terrible Harvey Keitel impersonation. I guffawed.
"So where is your loyal knight and true, these days? Do you live with him now?"
She shook her head. "Not yet. He's got some sort of five-hundred-foot studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Rent's not cheap, up there, but it's still cheaper than the dorms." Her eyes brightened even more when she spoke of him. She loved him. That was good, I thought to myself. I liked what that did to her face.
"What kind of things does he write?"
At that, Maura was silent for a long time. "It's the stuff he tells..." she finally imparted, almost hissing the words. She tilted her elbow back like a redneck, took a long pull of beer and set it down on the glass-topped table by the deck chair, wanting to talk with her hands.
"He made up this one on the spot, when we were at a kegger," she went on. "Somebody asked him why he didn't work at Blackwing any more."
I nodded. "I know the place. Out in Croyon, isn't it? I think I temped there once."
Maura nodded fiercely, btiing her lip to hide the cackle. "I mean, it's still standing, as far as I know. My friend's brother Will picks up gigs out there sometimes from All Hands Staffing, just like Justin did. But..." and she was trying so very hard to figure out a short explanation, "People will ask him, after they read it, like 'Did that really happen?' and he has to sit there and patiently explain to them why it didn't..."
She got up, looking past the deck rail toward the stars of town, down below. "They don't get him, around here. I... I get his magic, just fine. I'm glad we both got out."
I had no idea how to take that in, but acted like I did. "Did he ever publish it?"
Maura shook her head. "Not that one. He won't sell home stuff now. He goes to the reads up at St. Mark's Church, and he's really big into the poetry scene, and science fiction... but he won't ever sell stories about home. He says Home is the source of the words, and he doesn't want to slit its belly," she rolled her eyes, "Or something like that. Anyway, I'm telling you the way I remember it in this 'zine he printed up with Joe Evans, this little sci-fi rag they had called Radio Free Demarest. Lasted about a year. They they tried to make body jewelry..."
"The story," I prompted, taking the last drag of her proffered cigarette and snuffing it out. Maura nodded, slowly, shaking her finger.
"A-a-a-sh... I was getting to that. Anyway, you tell me..."
THE CAGE
A small, wiry seventeen-year-old boy in ragged black cutoff shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt pushed two empty metal hand-trucks down a wide gray second-story warehouse corridor as featureless and austere as the inside of George Orwell's own colon, the literal belly of Big Brother full of big boxes from Egypt and Israel and the Philippines, where sweatshop labor cranked out the designer clothes they hustled for a pittance at Blackwing Knitwear, former textile mill turned slave pit.
Blackwing took orders from all over the world, and contracted out to any big designer who could bribe them into finding some extra room in theri warehouse where none truly existed. The downstairs rows were twice as messy.
The rail at his right was blocked by a long line of collapsible aluminum hand trucks with hanging racks for clothing welded on. Justin Kalashnikov shoved the one last pile into place with a clang that shook the workds, then spent a few minutes shoving all of them further back into the cage of pipes that held them where they were, just so it looked like there was room for more if a boss happened by.
That being done, Justin whistled a bar of some Total Chaos song he definitely hadn't heard on the radio in Blackwing, and walked on down the hall. Turning right at the freight elevator, he promptly smacked his head against the network of low steel pipes that hung about his height from the floor, perpendicular to the rows back there.
No one seemed to be able to inform him what the pipes were for. Ned, the Invisible Plant Foreman, just hemmed and hawed about the roof being weak and walked away with twenty other things on his mind powering his mouth...
Justing paused to polish his glasses on his shirt, sighing over the wierd yellow dust that would never buff out of his three-months-new Doc Marten boots. He got that dust on his feet when he went back to smoke cigarettes in the pesilential storage space behind the mezzanine during unscheduled breaks after Jack the Night Stuporvisor (who called that section of the building 'the Cage') popped off to him about some bullshit thing and he fired back loud enough to hear...
But he couldn't stay mad at Jack. Jack was the ringmaster of a troubled nine-ring circus. Two service workers had walked off the lot that day. All Hands hadn't found any other temps on their whole Industrial roster who wanted to work at Blackwing, whose reputation preceded it everywhere in the circuits of Young and Underemployed in Powersburg, Pennsylvania, which were many and interlocking indeed.
So it was up to Justin and about three other equally qualified greenies to be the linchpins of the packing lines. For that, they ate an enormous ration of shit. He saw a lot of the Cage, his own concession to his own sanity and the realities of the Nine-to-Five (or, in his case, the Seven-to-Seven).
The metal supports across the open doorway that led back there looked like massive prison bars with three feet between them. (Hence, Justin assumed, the name.) It was part of the original building that didn't get used much. The floor was littered with trash and back-orders from long ago, and it was rare that anyone ventured past the pipes for anything.
The supports holding up the doorway also bisected the Cage to about fifty feet in. In either direction, said supports were clamped and welded and woven into a perilously low network of pipes that looked like monkey-barsk a kind of suspended ceiling in cold iron, only without ceiling-panels. To everyone else, it was just something to duck for. To Justin, it was a kind of Dadaist middle finger from Management.
The pipes went all the way back into the Cage, where they met with an older, crustier network of similar. Some branches of those pipes looked like they continued on through bricked or boarded arches with ancient knobs protruidng from the boarded ones, high up near the ceiling where Blackwing's west wall met with the low limestone of the Allegheny Ridge.
There were caves close by, but the countryside for miles around was trashed-out scrubland, about as picturesque as a strip mine. He hadn't followed the pipes very far back, though he longed to (preferably with a flashlight and a .22 semi-auto for rats that Dad wouldn't miss for one Mark Twain-style afternoon).
No one knew how far back the Cage really went, just that it was big. Folks who worked at Blackwing didn't exactly get paid to question such things, or think much at all past the math of the job, and the rather non-Euclidean math of the people doing it.
Justin did. Justin thought too much, anf for him time passed very, very slowly that year. They could have loaded the Cage down with more stock if they cleaned and painted back there, maybe.
Even with the backlog, the consensus between Picking and Packing was that they were short on everything that the big chain stores were demanding that fiscal quarter, even the Boys' and Girls' sizes. Somehow, the owners managed to juggle the books and squeak by, but anyone with half a head could see what a cock-up the whole operation was.
The owners liked it that way, apparently. Everything got written off no matter whats. They'd only reorder enough to fill immediate shortages, more concerned with clearing out the stock en masse. There were delays and headaches all around, but no one really ever asked any questions.
Lack of curiosity was apparently the key to success. If a building inspector ever saw the Cage, they would raise the roof. Someone was getting greased someplace.
Maybe he could talk to Kyla Spector down at the Sentinel, he thought as he did every night: she always tried to find the Muck-Raking Sensationalist Column Of The Week...
He wasn't fooling anyone but himself. The Sentinel was so petrified of getting sued that Kyla had to retract about three of her columns a year. It sold papers, but they were still chickenshit bastards. (Justin saw that much even as Assistant Editor for the four-times-yearly Teen section, and all the love-hate pat-the-little-fellow-on-the-head that came with that...)
That night, Justin's goals were less civic-minded, and more about finding something to get lost in, rather than having to hurry up and wait. He wanted to unpack for Shipping, or go get unmade boxes to fire down the line to the service workers toiling one floor below. It was someone else's turn to run the trucks upstairs for the pickers. Comma. Dammit.
He could only run six trucks upstairs at a time, anyway. And when the elevator was backed up, everyone let him know how much that pissed them off. He sighed, hitting the big green Elevator button to grab the final load waiting for him in the freight car, waiting as the hydros below him whined into life.
The previous summer was an endless party. The present day was a silent, resigned time of trembling at the gate while breaking his back twelve hours a day and five days a week while everyone else he knew was blowing off the last bit of steam before the mad grind of their senior year.
Two more months, he told himself. Just a temp job. Two more months that paid better than any job he ever had, but had opened his eyes to much more than he was sure he wanted to see.
"You get paid no matter what," his patient, long-suffering girlfriend always told him, rubbing lanolin on his blistered palms and patiently reminding him what college was going to look like with all those paychecks laying all those eggs...
But it was suddenly no longer time to be a kid. He wished he wouldn't have missed that memor before the fact. Justin's boots moved him upstairs again. His hands pulled the rope tie upward on the elevator door. It was barely time for First Break, and he already wanted to chuck the trucks and go swing on the monkey-bars.
Far below and behind, that garbage they called country music nowadays oosed from the PA system. After a while the music became white noise at Blackwing, just one more thing he forgot he was tuning out.
On the wall going down the stiars, generations of graffiti and notes wound the whole way up the support pole by the elevator. 0901 GREY HEATH. NED WHITE SUCKS AMISH DICK. Through the whole building, station to station, the black conveyor belt ran on, full of boxes, hissing. Far above, the pipes were making those clanking noises again. CHUNKCHUNKCHUNKCHUNK.
Then--
--The handtruck was yanked out of his hand. Justin came to with a massive lurch, wiping drool from his mouth, startled to be standing still instead of walking.
"How YOU makin' out?!?" God roared in his ear.
Wait. God had a mullet haircut. God... wasn't God, oh, just Adam, one of the packers from downstairs.
Justin winced.
"Hey, if you see me, like, walkin'toward a wall or something', I haven't slept right in about a week. Just... yell like that again. The life you save may be your own."
"I know," Adam replied instantly. "I had to have Lonny do that to me the other night, a couple times, only he uses props."
Justin frowned. "Explosives?"
"Worse. Ice water from the break room. Fucker. I got him back good, though. Anyway, you see the thing on the bulletin board, like as you're comin' in through the main door?"
Justin shook his head. Adam folded his skinny, tattooed arms. "You're lucky you're a temp. Layoffs again in a week."
"Ooh." Justin hissed through his teeth. "Place is supposed to fold in a year, I heard. Is that--"
Adam shrugged. "I'm goin' back to Engineering school up in Williamsport--"
"ADAM KOWALCZYK, PLEASE REPORT TO YOUR STATION!" one of the old biddies barked over the PA.
Adam sighed. "See ya on break."
He looked behind Justin toward the huge piles of unmade boxes. "How in the hell did you clean all that out in forty-five minues?" He nodded appreciatively at Justin, then at the spotless flor. "You work, son. I oughta start parkin' my skids back there."
"Uhh... don't mention it?" Justin moved for the parking spaces himself, looking to see that no one was trying to use the elevator. Stuff like that was happening a lot lately, the less sleep he got.
His body was at peak exertion, and every time he tried to stay up and write, work the next day was one big drone-out full of forgotten tasks. Lately, there were many man-hours' worth of things done that he couldn't remember doing until someone mentioned it, or wrote it in a log somewhere.
No one else was working Service that night , floaters like him or otherwise. John called off from being up all night with his eight-month-old son and their shared flu. Justin was pretty much a one-man crew.
CHUNKCHUNKCHUNKCHUNK. There it was again. He looked up at the pipes, but could see nothing from the first floor. Then motion pulled his eyes front. Rika Lombardo, waving lackadaisically at him from her station, long brown hair hanging in her face.
Rika's spider hands whipped through packing order after packing order, taping them up and sending them on down lthe line. Once in a while, she joined him for a smoke in the Cage when there was a lull in Shipping or she needed to go re-pick an order that someone screwed up.
Their shift was ten hours long, and thy only got one ten-minute break and dinner. After a while, you learned to bend the rules or you went nuts.
Once, when he was new and Rika was still showing him the ropes, a stray dog got into the plant on the night shift, through a bck loading door someone shocked open on break. The dog was asked to leave, and left, but not before killing an animal that no one could seem to positively form a consensus about.
Rika loved telling this story. Jack said it was a big old cave fish, what he called a "Blind Robin" or something, End of Discussion, shut the fuck up and get back to work. But the dismembered, mangled pieces didn't add up, no matter how many times Jack repeated, "I gutted enough a'them goddamn things, I oughta know what one looks like when I see it..."
"This part of the Ridge," Rika told him on break, the night of the Blind Robin, "Weell... The Monongahela Indians kept it sacred. They burnt offerings to fertilize the soil for the Hadnosaneh, like they were earthworms or something, and..."
"Adenoid-what?" Justin reached for a packing slip and a pencil. "how are you spelling that?"
Rika spelled it. "It literally means 'old way', but to the Monongahela, these things were like..." She snapped her fingers. "Like the Little People. Nature spirits. Il Fata--"
"--The Domovoy." Lost in thought, Justin nearly jumped half a foot when a slow, brain-damaged voice said "Dude." in his ear. He whirled on the bottom-most stair.
"Ancestors, little old-man ghost things that lived in the attic. You were supposed to leave them food."
"Uh, right. Ned told me to come help you." The guy was Justin's age, but looked much younger; half a head shorter, hair covering his ears, thick square glasses and one hoop earring. His face was nearly chinless, the eyes beady, the mouth oddly shaped. He wore a green t-shirt, baggy faded jeans, and a ridiculous pair of faux-snakeskin cowboy boots.
Justin eased up. " 'Bout time. What's your name?"
"Buck."
" 'kay, Buck, the more we get this goin' the quicker it gets. I'll lshow you where to run the hand-trucks. We'll tkae turns on that. That'll free up some time for me to finish cleaning up the Service Area. We like to keep it done up for the bad craziness. The backers are always callin' for boxes and--I'm sorry, kid, am I bustin' your groove?" Buck was ogling Rika as she disappeared up the aisle correcting an order.
"Hey, you two." The squat, burly bearded figure of Jack materialized behind Buck without a breath. Justin blinked, rubbing his eyes. Jack's red beard was bristling. He wore a flannel and jeans, and looked tired and mad.
"Whenever they get done beatin'you to dath, Justin, how 'bout goin' down C Row and bringin' up all the single orders that are waitin' to ship?"
Justin feigned weariness. "Are you sure? I was gonna see about refilling all the stations with boxes at once so I could throw my back out and go home." He grinned tiredly. "I'm almost there, Jack. I've almost found something so stupid to do that the Government will write me a check just to keep breathing. You wait. I swear, it'll be done."
Jack laughed bloodlessly and looked at Buck, jerking a thumb at Justin. "This one's gonna be a permanent hire. He knows how we operate. You come on with me, kid. I'll show you how to refill the packing stations."
I was gonna do that, Justin mouthed over Jack's shoulder. Jack shrugged and kept moving. "Don't worry about it. On the house--"
Then Justin snapped to attention again, rubbing dust out of his eyes. He was marching back C Row, downstairs, behind a huge old biker named Butch Coppersmith.
Butch had a long gray braid and a Bowie knife he brought with him every day. Butch never said much to anyone but Jack, and that was usually mumbled in monosyllables.
Justin stopped as they reached the hand-trucks full of orders to ship in C Row. Most of them weren't singles, but double orders on double trucks Bungee-corded together side by side.
The first few weren't to be in C Row at all, he realized blearily as he read the white tags on the handles. "Oh, wait--"
Butch disappeared off into the darkness. Justin peered at the tags on every handtruck, remembering ten minutes too late that Rika, just before break, an hour and change ago, asked him to run a triple order she'd corrected back down to the front of the line.
Justin knew right were it was. He never even stuck one of his beloved red sticky-notes on it, just wrote down the number of the pace on his dumb right hand, C-17. Easy enough to remember, just a letter and a number, it...
C-17, read yellow spray-paint stencil an inch away from the toes of his boots. He looked at the empty space. All three hand-trucks full of picked orders were gone.
Justin scratched the spiky black thatch of hair on his head and waxed mighty wroth, and his countenance fell, and great was his confusion just like every other day in this nut house. Buck? No. Does not scan. Veto. Buck would know what to do with one random three-pronged order if you inserted it sideways in a hard-to-reach-place.
The kid looked like he might know where to find said hard-to-reach place, if you walked him through it a couple times. In any case, Justin couldn't admit he couldn't remember how all the empthy trucks had shot back into the parking slots, fresh meat for the pickers an hour ahead of schedule.
Justin was more than a little worried. He'd been a sleepwalker as a kid. But to admit he wasn't cut out for Graveyard Shift would mean that Blackwing had bested him. This was his first real job (besides writing columns sometims for the same damn Powersburg Sentinel he used to deliver door-to-door). He couldn't allow this gig to best him, or he was a schmuck to hsi family and to himself. And to Maura.
Someone was looking at him from four rows down. Big. Green eyes. Butch was... smiling?
"Forget somethin'?" he rumbled laconically in a voice two stesp lower than Hank William's Jr's. Justin shook his head immediately, clearing the rasp from his throat.
"Somebody's been doing my work for me while I wasn't looking," he confessed. Would wonders never cease, Butch barked laughter.
"Kid," he told him, "I wish I had your problems. The last person down this way was you. I seen on the cameras. So that would imply you either need to lay off the KGB..." (Justin looked confused.) "Sorry. Kind Green Bud. Guess not. Anyway, last one on camera was you. Might get some coffee in you, son, you're slippin' a bit. But way to get ahead of yourself."
Butch lumbered further back, eyeballing the shelf and checking a string of numbers written on the back of his own left hand. The discussion was apparently closed.
"Now I've seen everything," Justin muttered to himself. "That big biker just said more than two words to someone who wasn't middle management. I musta gotten on his good side--"
CHUNKCHUNKCHUNKCHUNK
Justin's head whipped towrads the ceiling, but the network of pipes didn't come down to this floor. He could have sworn he heard something like a chuckle.
"You believe in ghosts, Butch?" he called back softly. Butch didn't seem to hear. Justin eased on down the row, sidestepping at each hand-truck and checking the tags.
There was always something left to do, and Butch was right. At this point, coffee was mandatory. Or Thorazine. Or maybe just home and bed, after a long hot shower and a bottle of emotional bleach.
He left the rows and shuffled through the long gray rectangle of the break room, his boots silent against the lumpy linoleum. Behind him, he heard the bathroom door slam as Buck staggered out in a cloud of sweet autumn smoke.
"Dude," the new guy announced, not following it up with anything, and went the other way.
Justin fished in his pocket for three dimes and fed the old, flyspecked coffee machine with its 1965 typeface and faded, grainy ad-graphic Wonderama. Just under the coin slot, one of those sticky hands you got out of the gumball machines at Gateline Foods coruscated in the dust like a spatulate-fingered serpent.
Outside the window, Short Mountain rose over Pennsylvania State Route 66 at the other end of the parking lot. Verdant summer hardwood foliage spread before his eyes, whispering in the gloaming as the breeze kicked up again.
Something clicked in his head. Justin sprayed coffee through his nose, and immediately launched into a strin of his grandfather's Ukranian profanities that would have made Old Devil Czernobog himself blush.
But he wasn't remembering 'Fantasia'. This was another cartoon entirely, an ancient black-and-white one about some elves doing all of an old cobbler's work for him while the ragged, exhausted shoemaker slept for a few scant hours, and woke to a world that looked new as it had not for longer than memory permitted.
"Justin, have you seen Buck?"
Justin whirled at Jack's voice from the shadows by the elevator.
" 'Bout...half an hour ago," he admitted. "Wehre'd we hire him through, the state hospital?"
Jack chortled through the huge wad of gum that Justin knew was temping itself for a big gnaw of chewing tobacco. "No wonder you got that column in the paper," the boss replied, surprising the hell out of Justin for the second time that evening. "What you said about the lack of local business initiatives, and what that's done to heavy industry in this part of Pee-Ay, kid I see that every day. 'Bout time someone else said it."
Butch passed by. When he heard them talking, he moved in Jack's direction. Jack hooked his thumbs in his beltloops an shook his head.
"We're gonna hire another Service Worker so you can get back to doin' just one post at a time. Pretty soon, you'll be only four days a week. Twelve bucks an hour. How'd that be?"
Justin shrugged. "Is there any actual increase in latitude, or do I just stick a broom up my ass while I'm at it so I can sweep the floor?" When Jack laughed, he continued, smiling his strange smile. "Okay, but I want First Trick."
"One condition," Jack admonished. Justin sighed like it wa the last air he had. Jack kept on talking. "Thought I smelled somebody smokin' a joy-stick in the Cage. You go roust Loser Boy out, I'll start up your paperwork for that right now."
Justin waited for a few seconds. "Ar you off your meds?" he asked cautiously. "I didn't get you anything."
Jack knew how to use that one finger, all right. I looked like it would keep going up and hook around the pipes. Then it didn't. "You got your knife with you?"
Justin removed the long orange carton-slitter from his right hip ocket, and frowned. "Why?"
Jack's eyes slitted themselves, looking faraway and crafty. Justin was starting to feel like he'd walked into the worst David Lynch movie he'd ever seen.
"Maybe nothing, these days. This is an old place. Go have a smoke after, get some coffee, whatever. Just... find him for me. I... mumblemumblemumble mumblemumblemumble..."
Justin lowered his head, adopting an obsequious expression he'd learned at school. He never would have asked Jack to repeat himself, but the last bit sounded something like I'm too damn old to go up there for one more of these.
"Anyone," Jack continued. He meant Ned, of course. "Gives you any shit, tell 'em to come see me." But he couldn't meet Justin's eyes.
"Want me to go with 'im?" Butch rumbled quickly into the uncomfortable silence, having materialized between them at some point. Justing tried not to yelp, letting the anger pin him to the moment and keep him awake.
Jack was smiling. Inside, Justin fumed and sputtered. Whatever was going on here, the little gnome knew all about it.
"No, Butch, you c'n stand down." Jack looked away, with no look Justin liked. "Let the kid get his spurs."
Before he said something he'd regret, Justin bolted for the stairs, for the back hall, for the Cage. He swung money-bar style on the pipes for most of the way there, until his blistered hands got tired and his Docs touched Masonite once more.
There were plants growing up there in the ceiling, ivy that wrapped around the pipes, some kind of animal tracks, it...
Man-made habitat?
The phrae came from nowhere, from watching Nova the other night, from his naked and endless imagination that sang the tune without the vowels and never shut up...
As Justin's ebon eyes followed the network of pipes further back into the original warehouse of Blackwing Knitwear, he rememberd the narrator, Alistair Cooke or Marlon Perkins or whoever the hell, droning on about architects in the next century accommodating wildlife into the designs of their buildings.
What... Shit. Justin kept losing his train of thought. Something about the Coast Guard moving sunken ships to make new coral reefs. And birds' nests. Something--
His hair was standing on end. "Oh. Here we are," he muttered. The dust thickened. The pole-lined mouth of the Cage was dark. The air in the greasy stone corridor made him gag.
Justin took out the box-cutter, dropping the blade to its maximum length for whatever good the flimsy thing might do him, stumbling through that stained catacomb of old cardboard boxes, plastic ribbons and broken skids, that wale of waste and bedbugs, that impenetrable briar patch.
At one point, he hurled two wooden skids across the floor in sequence and walked over them on a patch he wasn't too sure didn't become a vast, whistling hole. Justin wanted to kick his Dad's ass for ever introducing him to Edgar Allan Poe and words like 'oubliette' and 'chasm' and 'abyss' ...And thank you, too, Pop, for all the Lovecraft I got stuck in my head right now, the rats in the walls eating the bones, and the momsers send the Jew in first...
After about ten more feet, he had to smack his baby Maglite against his elbow a few times (lightly, slightly, and politely) to get the light going again. He could smell pot. It made him smile wistfully for the days before random piss-tests.
The the toe of his left boot YOINKED, SLID jarringly to the right, whipping him ROUND, FUCK, he was GONNA FALL, and--
Justin leaned into the impact, coming out of it on his toes, rocking forward, back, forward. His heart was hiding someplace in his ears, gasping but somehow still alive.
He was looking at a sea of rags that shored up the edges of a box canyon leading out to a wall half a continent away. Above that, the pipes continued further back, past the point of logic, into several doors at various heights in the wall.
Now there was no mistaking the shapes of the thumb-bolts placed in those doors. Curiouser and curiouser. It stunk like a bucket of guts back there, he thought, then his forward foot slipped on something, and he caught himself.
Then his light worked. Well. And he saw what he slipped on.
Then he breathed through his guts, like the Sifu told them when he could afford to go hit the dojo that week. Justin breathed through his guts and began to behave as if his body were already dead, his mind as empty as a wandering raincloud divested of an autumn storm.
The fear burned off him as he really saw what he was looking at. Those green drips weren't antifreeze. The twisted thing stuck to the box in front of him on its suckers wasn't really some weird mushroom.
The bottom end had bone to it, like a ball-and-socket joint, and tendon, sliced through, dripping green. The skin was toad-colored, fishy-colored,
(0901 GREY HEATH, his mind coughed out idiotically)
"Oh, fuck."
The mushroom had an opposable thumb.
"It fell on me," Buck said in Justin's ear. Five seconds later, Justin rleaxed the box-cutter from his throat.
Buck accepted the blame wordlessly, hanging his head; dazed, shell-shocked, and more than a little green. "Just fell out of the ceiling like a monkey."
"You have monkeys falling out of your ceiling a lot?" Justin asked, then gave up at the blank look, glancing over in the wreckage around the place where the hand clung to the box. A carton-slitter, probably Buck's, sat near it on the floor with the blade the whole way out. Buck's eyes behind his glasses were tuned to no channel at all.
"I think it was just a baby, and..."
Rustle-rustle-rustle.
There was motion in the rags... You had to rent 'Alien', Dad, Justin thought. Just last weekend, damn your smirking soul to Hell...
Buck had a flashlight he'd probably jacked from one of the med-kits downstairs. Its thin, milky glow illuminated his pale, confused face splattered with green stuff. In his free hand, he held a smoldering joint.
"Tax time, fucker." Justin grabbed the joint, hit it long and hard, and put it back in Buck's hand. "Okay. Now, if you feel anxious from here on out, like you're gonna lose your shit, just..." He waited until he had Buck's attention. "Just breathe into my sac."
Two seconds.
"Never mind. Pass me that joint and come on. We'll get the Shriners to donate you a sense of humor when we get out of here. Now the thing that you saw. Was it a--" Justin began, and got stuck for a word. Rat? Mountain lion? Emu? Rhinocerous? Cassowary? Sloth? Tapir? Or someother kind of three toed ungulate...
"It was in the ceiling," Buck began. Then a whistle of breeze stirred the sleepy dust, ending in a dull meat THWACK.
Something connected with Buck's face, Justin realized a full second later. Meanwhile, Buck hit the floor backward. Justin ducked into a crouch, trying to look all around him at once.
CHUNKCHUNKCHUNKCHUNK
"Hey!" He shielded his eyes, shining his flashlight beam up and around, into the darkness and the pipes. "You wanna try that with someone where it ain't a sucker-punch? Th--Oh. My. GOD."
Tears welled up in his dark eyes.
CHUNK.
CHUNK.
They didn't get much sun. They seemed to glow. They stayed where they were.
CHUNK.
"I'm not cracking up," he told them. "You... I was hearing the noises you all make with your... hands, there, when you."
The twinkle in his eyes shone brighter than the end he couldn't put on the sentence, the sense of wonder he'd somehow managed to hold onto this long.
Their wide, fishy heads jerked and snakedanced,a ll on their own time, to their own beat, and it all made sense. The design of the building before it changed hands, they...
His fledgling reporter's mind got it all in a long, fine flash. "The old owners were your friends. They fed you, and..."
From above him came a soft, sardonic patter that could have been applause. Some of them were purring. The largest one might have smiled, as it dropped Rika's picking order into his hand, still in its small plastic bag.
They swarmed and crawled and swung, a masterpiece of flesh, moss-backed, web-handed, with long whip tails and only vestigial legs.
Muscles rippled. Flagellant shells swung from pipes, or clutched them from above. All of them were looking at him with wide, sightless white eyes, gesturing with complicated hands.
And their mouths... Justing thought of the giant earthworms he and Dad yoused to dig to go fishing, the ones that swarmed across the glagstone sidewalks of Powersburg after the long October rains. The creatures were masticating the thick, stagnant dust as he watched, eating it right out of the air.
Back here was where the real material-handlers lived and bred. They'd be perfect warehouse workers, Justin thought in amazement. They could get anywhere, lift anything...
Then he thought again about the elves and the shoemaker. And the wild doves that lived in the attic cupola of his own house the ones the old stage-magician who built the place had kept and trained, the ones whose babies came back there every year...
CLICK.
And his heart burst in air like a fission bomb.
Meanwhile, Buck took one look and ran for his life, with a great ruckus of slipping on garbage and screaming. The creatures jerked back, startled.
"It's okay," Justin called up to them, pitching his voice softly and clearly. He held up both hands where they could see them, not letting go of the Maglite. "Don't... don't leave. I'm... I'm like the ones before. I... I'm kind of like you."
Time spun out in the Cage. The Hadenosaneh all slowly began to wiggle and brachiate, ears fixed on the sound of his breathing.
The eyes of the largest creature iridesced beautifully as it swung down on its tail, hanging face-to-face with Justin, breathing bitter milkweed breath in his face. Like a child in a dream, Justin lifted one bony hand and stroked it between the eyes.
COUSIN. The voice in his head made him jump. The creature chittered. Laughter. Then it pulled back a bit, cocking its head, sniffing and looking impatient. OTHER MAN HURT MY BABY GIRL. HE DIES IN FIRE.
Justin processed this. "And me?"
The creature put its head on Justin's shoulder like an inquisitive cat, and stuck its strange nose in his ear. Justin shuddered down to the tips of his toes.
YOU LEAVE.
The creature showed him what it had in its hand:
A Zippo lighter, engraved,TO BUCK. HAPPY 18TH.
Justin looked again at the motes of dust hanging in the air, the wall-to-wall of oceans of combusible trash, the wood frame structure of the oldest section...
Then he looked at the doors that led back into the hill. And he roared with laughter. "Give me ten minutes' head start, okay?"
Their silence seemed to give consent. Justin strolled out of the cage, half-hurrying, not daring to whistle. Knowledge was never really cause, he knew, just as he knew there'd be other work, but in a place like this it was always best to cover your ass.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Mercury Retrograde Press.
Copyright © 2009 by Edward Morris
First Electronic Edition—published 2009
ISBN 978-0-9819882-9-0