Aberrations (5 page)

And besides the loss of feeling, there was loss of control. All at once she fell like a rag doll to the floor, cracking her chin painfully.

She suspected she was still being raped, but she could not even raise her head and turn to see.

Above her own labored breathing, Ellen became aware of another sound, a low, buzzing hum. From time to time her body rocked and flopped gently, presumably in response to whatever he was still doing to it.

Ellen closed her eyes and prayed to wake. Behind her shut lids, vivid images appeared. Again she saw the insect on her aunt’s dead lip, a bug as black, hard, and shiny as Peter’s eyes. The wasp in the sand dune, circling the paralyzed spider. Aunt May’s corpse covered with a glistening tide of insects, crawling over her, feasting on her.

And when they had finished with her aunt, would they come and find her here on the floor, paralyzed and ready for them?

She cried out at the thought and her eyes flew open. She saw Peter’s feet in front of her. So he had finished. She began to cry.

“Don’t leave me like this,” she mumbled, her mind still swarming with fears.

She heard his dry chuckle. “Leave? But this is my home.”

And then she understood. Of course he would not leave. He would stay here with her as he had stayed with her aunt, looking after her as she grew weaker, until finally she died and spilled out the living cargo he had planted in her.

“You won’t feel a thing,” he said.

The Thing in the Woods

by Nate Kenyon

As they approached the I-91 interchange, the argument took a nasty turn.

“I don’t know what party you were at,” Nyck said, “but the one I went to was supposed to be for the executives’ club, not some swingers’ group grope.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it.  You asked me to talk to him.”

“Talk, yes.  Not slip your hand down the front of his pants.”

“I did no such thing.  Joe and I were discussing your career.

“So I suppose that look of rapture on his face was because of your shining conversational skills and not the way your tits looked in that blouse?”

Molly flashed him a withering look.  “Sometimes you can be so crude.  He’s an old man, Nyck.”

“Not old enough.  I bet he could still get it up pretty good.”

“Will you please stop?”

“And then, when it was time to leave and you said you wanted to stay a while longer, Christ, like a neon sign blinking on over your head saying, for a good time call—”

“Will you please I wish you would just please SHUT UP!”

The slightly hysterical edge in her voice brought an abrupt end to the tirade.  Nyck sat stiffly upright next to her, white-knuckled hands gripping the wheel of the Volvo.  His shoulders strained at the seams of his tuxedo jacket. 

Then he sighed, flexed his hands and let his shoulders slump.  “Fuck,” he said.  He glanced quickly at her, then back at the road.  “What a night.”

Molly knuckled at the ache behind her eyes and stared out into the darkness.  It was past midnight and they were the only car on the highway.  The headlights cut a narrow path through the black, white lane dashes flicking rhythmically past, one after another.  It had begun to drizzle.  Wipers scraped across glass, smearing the shadows of the trees on either side of the road.

She glanced at the glove compartment, and imagined the gun cradled inside; patiently waiting, barrel’s eye peering out at the darkness. 

No.  Don’t think about that.  Not now.

She let her head fall back against the seat.  The motion of the car rocked her gently, and she felt herself drifting off.  No matter how Nyck treated her, she was unable to sustain the hot flare that burned in her stomach.  Until recently, she had still held out hope that he would find the strength to change.  It seemed impossible that the years had changed him so completely.

They’d met at a Florida State seminar on English literature.  She’d needed it for her major, he was simply looking for a credit to get him past the finish line.  He was athletic, charming, good looking.  All the girls loved him.  She was small and shy and bookish.  She never understood what he’d seen in her.

But they’d fallen hard for each other very quickly. She’d never been one to force anything, but with Nyck, that was fine.  He seemed to pull something inside of her out into the light, and she liked the feeling.

The expression that passed across her mother’s face the first time she’d met Nyck was priceless.  Like she’d tasted something that had spoiled.  Molly had never done anything to make her mother disapprove of her, not in all her years growing up. And that, in the end, had only made her more resolute in her decision.  Their relationship suddenly turned into a rebellion.  She took every opportunity to throw him in her mother’s face, saying,
yes, this is me.  This is what I want.

After graduation they rented an apartment above a bakery in St. Petersburg, and the sweet smell of freshly-cooked Challah bread filled their bedroom each morning.  Looking back later, those days had the fuzzy, dizzying quality of a dream.  Nyck had focused his attentions on her in a way that was both flattering and slightly overwhelming.  He did everything with her, for her; helped pick her clothes, her friends, her music and movies and restaurants.  Because of him, she became ever more trendy, more sophisticated, more worldly.  Nobody had ever wanted her this way, and she struggled to understand how to deal with it.

She spent her days shelving books in a library down the street, while he worked for a man who sold insurance out of a little shop in Clearwater.  At night they would eat Chinese food while sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the packing box that served as a coffee table, and talk about buying land and raising a family.

A year later he proposed to her on a camping trip to Katahdin in Maine.  Instead of being silver-screen romantic, it was awkward and sweet.  He dropped the ring and she was unable to stop giggling, even as he slid it on her finger. They made love on a bed of pine needles and she got all scratched up and itchy, but she didn’t much care.  All she wanted was to feel him inside her. 

When he came he grabbed her hair and his mouth opened but no sound came out; every muscle and tendon turned to rock.  The scream she kept waiting for had been bitten back too hard, and when she kissed him, she tasted blood.

A short while after that they were married in a small ceremony in his hometown in New Hampshire, with their parents and her brother as best man. Her mother seemed to come around at last.  They returned to Florida but she could tell Nyck’s heart wasn’t in it, and soon he began talking about moving back home again, back to New England.

It was what he wanted, she told herself.  He was her husband, and she must obey his wishes.

She could not recall the precise moment when the smell of Challah bread in the morning began to sicken her.  But Nyck kept buying it, and she kept making French Toast for their breakfast, too afraid to tell him. 

They moved away from the little bakery and into a larger apartment in Portland and the smell eventually left her clothes, but their lives grew more and more cluttered as Nyck began his rise up the ladder in a larger firm.  Though she wanted to look for a new job, he insisted she quit working.  He was bringing in nearly six figures now, and they could afford to buy a house and start talking about children.  He wanted lots of them.  She would not tell him no.  They tried to get pregnant every night, whether she was interested or not. 

As the days passed and she didn’t conceive, she saw less and less of him.  He would stay later and later at the office, and there were times when she wondered seriously if he were having an affair.  But she began to realize that his career was not going exactly the way he wanted, and when he was passed over for another promotion she saw the change in him more clearly.  The late hours he kept began to feel more desperate.

When she told him she was finally pregnant, he smiled like a man who had found out he was the butt of a joke.  She didn’t find out until days later that he had lost his job, and had been spending his time on the road, looking for work somewhere else.

* * * * *

Molly hardly realized she had drifted off until she was jarred awake again.  Her head thudded dully, and her eyes felt filled with sand.

The car shuddered over uneven road.  She looked at her husband.  He sat hunched over the wheel and peered out into the darkness.  The green lights of the dash lit his face up from below, stretching the shadows around his jowls and eyes.

She turned to stare out the windshield.  The rain had picked up, and the wipers worked harder to flick away a sheet of water with each pass.  She shook away the memories.  Probably the weather and her aching head, and of course the argument.  All that had combined to make her feel quite nostalgic indeed.

The party that night had been held at a sprawling country estate overlooking the Kennebec River, about forty-five minutes from their house, which was located in the suburbs outside of Portland.  It was a fairly quick shot down the pike and across a couple of short city roads.  Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour in this weather.  They should be on the last leg of the turnpike now. 

But what she saw through the rain was some back road lined with brush, hardly wide enough for two cars to pass each other.  A light mist blew in ghostly white tendrils across the asphalt, merging with the skeletal branches of the trees to form a seething, shifting illusion of solid ground.  The headlights were practically useless. 

Thump
.  Her teeth came together with a click. The car rocked on its springs.  Another pothole, then a series of them;
thump-thud-thud.

What an awful place, she thought.  “Where are we?”

Nyck was sweating lightly.  “I decided to take another way home.”

“This is like somebody’s driveway.”

“So now you decide to put your two cents in?”

“I fell asleep—”

“No shit.”

“Okay,” she said carefully, “so you got off the turnpike.” 

He glanced over at her.  What did he see when he looked at her now?  She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

The road obviously hadn’t seen much attention for quite some time.  The car shuddered, running over cracks and holes and ragged gaps in the pavement.  She hadn’t seen a house, a mailbox or another road.  She hadn’t even seen another car since she woke up.  It was as if they had dropped off the face of the earth. 

There were roads like this, she knew.  There were still places where you could get lost and never see anyone for hours, huge stretches of nothing but pine and oak and a few squirrels and bears.  But this close to Portland?  It was hard to believe.  Unless Nyck had gotten them turned around somehow.  Unless they were moving away from the city and any place civilized.

The mist seemed to dissolve whole sections of ground just ahead of them as the rain drummed steadily, and the wipers worked harder to keep up.  “I think we should turn around,” she said.  “Maybe we can retrace our steps.”

“I know what I’m doing.”  This time he did not look at her at all.  She could see his hands tightening on the wheel, his protruding knuckles like bones in the dashboard lights.    

“Look, I’m sorry about tonight, okay?”

“Forget it.”

“I think we should talk—”

“Jesus.”  The word was expelled from his mouth like something bitter.  “You can’t leave anything alone, can you?  Know what I think?  I think you can’t stand being with me anymore.  Maybe you wish we never got married in the first place.”

The silence hung between them like a third passenger.

“Maybe my life didn’t turn out exactly as I pictured it,” Molly said.  “I know yours didn’t either.  The question is, what do we do now?”

He glanced at her in surprise.  They were coming up on a turn.  He was driving much too fast as something big and dark lumbered out of the shadows and directly in front of the car. 

She screamed as he twisted the wheel and they slid sideways across wet pavement.  The shape loomed up before the sweeping headlights, huge and black and dripping.  She saw fur and the flash of something white, and the bright yellow glint of its eyes. 

A jarring thud threw her up against the dashboard and the car swung violently around, rear end swapping places with the front.  Tires shrieked; they slid off the shoulder and came to a sudden stop facing back the way they had come, engine stalled and facing an empty road. 

The headlights were dimmer than before.  One of the bulbs must have shattered.  The mist swirled and seethed.

“My God,” Nyck whispered, after a moment.  He was sitting in the same position, gripping the steering wheel with both hands.  “I hit it head-on, didn’t I?  I fucking hit it.”  He slammed his palms into the wheel.  “Shit!”

“What was it?”

“A bear, I think.  Isn’t that what it looked like to you?”

“I don’t know,” Molly said.  It hadn’t looked much like a bear at all, in fact.  It had looked like nothing she had ever seen before.  She took a deep, shuddering breath.  Her breasts ached where she had slammed into the seatbelt, and she caressed her slightly rounded belly.  She shivered, weak from the sudden rush of adrenaline, her stomach clenching and unclenching like a tight, wet fist in her guts.

The engine ticked softly, the sound mixing with the rain pattering on the hood. 

Outside the car, nothing moved.

Nyck kicked the emergency brake and opened the door, letting in a swirl of cold, damp air. 

“Wait a minute,” she said.  “What if it’s not dead?”

“I was going fifty miles an hour.  I want to check on the car.”  He slammed the door, pulled the jacket of his tuxedo up around his head and ran to the front of the Volvo, crouching in the mud.  She cracked her window, eyes scanning slowly up the road, expecting to see the rounded hump of the bear carcass.  But she saw nothing except thick underbrush and shadows and that seething blanket of mist. 

That was no bear.
  It had been too big for a dog and it hadn’t been the right shape for a deer or moose.  It had been huge.  And something else; she couldn’t be sure, because everything happened so fast, but she could have sworn it had been standing upright.