Three Miles Past (19 page)

That he’d never know unless someone with patience took the time to show him.

And then your face exploded into the wood of the door, and now you’re staring up at the ceiling.

Naked, check.

Waxed, yes.

Tied at all four points.

The heating register at the top of the wall blowing for all its worth, the room swampy, a jungle.

“Call me Jack if you want,” a voice says from the window.

If you crane your head forward, you can just tease a form out from the shadow of the curtain.

“Thomas?” you say, hopefully.

“Jack,” the man corrects, his words lispy and wrong. “You are a man of the twentieth century, are you not? My child, in a way. More ways than one, really.”

When he turns to face you, to give you his face, he’s Stick Man.

Shudder now.

This is the other end.

You always pictured a slight slit opening up in some forgotten corner, dark fingers pushing through to tear that rip wider, allow your punishment to come surging through, body after body, shadows to embrace you, to rub against you, to whisper into your neck exactly what you’ve always wanted to hear, which would be the end of you:
We know who you are. We’ve come to watch. We want to be like you. We’re here forever.

Not interdimensional homicide detectives or unborn children from the future, come back to avenge who should have been their parents, but faceless forms dripping with adoration, watching your every facial tic, so they can mimic, your expressions rippling through all of them like a virus until they crawl inside your mouth, swim in your body, their eyes looking up at you from your own palms until you have to make fists, run and run and run, never stop, your state of panic permanent, no solitude anymore, no death, just a fullness inside, suffocating you.

Except that’s not it at all.

What you’re getting, what you’ve got, it’s your most recent victim, risen to practice on you what he learned from you.

The long muscle close to your femur twitches once.

“Jack,” you say, stalling even though these attempts to dilate the moment, delay the inevitable, they’re always so laughable. So obvious.

Still.

Stick Man nods, steps forward. Angles his mangled head over to better study your naked form.

“As in Whitechapel,” he says, air hissing through where his teeth once were, then he looks towards the moth-dark window.

Jack the Ripper.

Shake your head in disgust.

Does it even count, if the person who finally eviscerates you, if he’s off his rocker, living in some running delusion?

Or, if he’s not even real.

“They always find you,” he says, placing his bloody palm to the glass of the window, the night darkening there, the moths converging. “Them, I mean,” he says, and looks down to the second bed.

To Thomas.

Stick Man grins when you kick and pull against your restraints.

Useless.

“What are they saying to you?” he says, moving his hand across the glass slowly, amused by the moths’ simplicity, it seems. Like dragging shapes in the sand.

“That you were just holding them,” you say. “For me.”

Stick Man nods like that’s about right.

“I was born during your civil war,” he says, boredom in his voice now. “Born with a surgeon’s hands, of course. But that—forget it. They make you last, though, the . . . what are you calling them, the eggs? ‘Thomas?’ I’m guessing that’s somebody you used to—”

Tell him that they’re not eggs.

“Not eggs?” he says, a bloody approximation of a smile trying to form on his ruined face.

Seeds. But don’t say it out loud.

Buck and kick and scream when he goes to the briefcase, though, and, instead of dialing back to the past, he just slams it against the corner of the short bureau.

And again, the contents finally clunking down to the floor.

He looks down to them, counting with his eyes and fingers.

“There were seven when I found them in that whore,” he says, and watches for your reaction. “They were whispering in my head for two days before I found her.”

“They’re just—”

“Shut up! We don’t have long, here. They can’t be outside the body too long. They start to, well. You know. Hatch.”

Now he’s lowering himself for one, bringing it up on his fingertips. “Who are you?” he says to it, then cups it with both hands, breathes down onto it and closes his one eye.

“The same year I . . . made my discovery, I, well. You know this, of course. I wanted to see what would happen. The keepers showed me how to get them inside, to carry—it was
surgery
—but you can shit one out if you really want. If you promise to keep it secret. They don’t know that, they think they can only be cut out.”

“They?”

Stick Man studies you for a few seconds then shrugs, lobs the seed onto your gut. You hollow your belly, catch it, hold it. He steps into the bathroom, does something loud, comes back with a large shard of mirror.

“Hey!” he says to the window, “I need a moment here, guys,” and he scoops up another egg, tosses it into the far corner.

The window darkens there, goes clear where Stick Man was standing before. Where he’s standing again.

He looks down and lines the mirror up against whatever he’s seeing.

“See?” he says, trying to tilt the mirror for you as well.

“What?” you say, the mirror bloody now at the edges, everything in it trembling, but, for a flash, a reflection pulls across its surface.

Two pale people, standing guard on the top of the shorter building across the alley. Their faces looking right into the mirror.

Stick Man waves.

“Hitler,” he says, not looking over to you. “He was born nine months after I officially retired. Coincidence?”

He comes back to you for the answer.

When you just stare at him he shrugs, holds the mirror out over like a plate, and drops it.

It shatters over your chest but doesn’t cut you.

He ferrets up a sliver of it.

“Surgery,” he says, grinning, but first collects all the seeds, stacks them on the bed beside you, and—this speaks well for the hotel’s choice in mattress—they don’t collapse, they hold their crude pyramid.

Stick Man likes it, looks down to you.

“It’s you or nobody,” he says, showing his own cracked-open torso. “Somebody used me all up, I mean.” Then he laughs to himself, says, “You’re about to be part of history, did you know that? These eggs, they’re older than the world, man. Passed down from large intestine to large intestine. Lost a hundred times, found a hundred more. I think there were twelve when it all began. That sound about right?”

“Don’t,” you tell him.

This is the pleading. The begging.

Never the best part.

“You know what, though?” he says then, dropping his shard. “Surgery means recovery, and you’ve got to book it if you want to stay ahead of them. However, the human body being what it is, there are of course alternate points of entry, if you will.”

This time he comes back from the bathroom with this room’s new supply of hand lotion.

He stirrups your feet up so your knees are in shoulders, and warms the lotion in his hands before rubbing it into you.

“Say ah,” he says, his face right in yours as he forces the tapered but-not-tapered-enough leading nose of the first seed against your wet, unrelaxed rectum.

Hold his eyes as best you can, to show him you can take this.

But still.

Your throat swells, and when you finally scream he puts his mouth right against yours and screams back,
with
you, his breath hot in your own mouth, the dry holes where his teeth were dripping dark fluid from him to you.

And then there’s five more.

~

Stick Man was the wrong name.

More like Oyster Man. Oyster Man and his six smooth children.

This has been the night you gained twelve pounds. And your hands, they know what to do, have been kneading the new lumps in your lower abdomen for hours, it feels like. Working them up, in, deeper. The lotion runny in the room’s heat, spilling from its bottle beside you.

How is it not all gone, right?

There are mysteries in the world.

Gone as well are your restraints.

And the moths, though it takes you a while to cue into their absence. To ask yourself why the streetlight’s bleeding in

Will there be gooey footprints in the carpet, though? Knee smears to either side of your hips?

You don’t want to know. Because you already know, can read the headlines now: Traveling Salesman Forgets Self, Doesn’t Eat, Goes Feral in Room 428, Impregnates Self with Stones of Dubious Origin.

No. Try again.

Person Least Likely to Save the World Saves World. Reverse Ingests the World’s Lingering Destruction.

Like any of them could really hatch into another Hitler, another Black Plague. Like man wouldn’t have spilled these particular beans centuries ago.

But maybe that’s why they find the ones like you, think?

Give a gift like this to the best church deacon you know, and inside of two years he’ll have saved the world to death.

No, it takes someone with discipline. Someone who’s lived a
life
of discipline, of restraint, of control.

Someone like you.

Now, stand if you can. Wait for your inner ears to catch up, right you against this new weight in your gut, this new center of gravity, this new purpose.

Thomas.

Don’t even look out the window. They’re not going to be there. You’re not that weak.

Instead, watch the blood slip down the insides of your thighs.

Something new every day, right?

The world, it’s truly a wonderful place. And, yes, you can fashion a butt plug of sorts from common items scavenged from your everyday typical hotel room.

Which is not what this room is anymore.

You’ve always promised never to burn your real name, the one on the register downstairs.

But you never expected to find Thomas either. After all these years.

Walk away, now. Don’t even bother with clothes. Your suit, rumpled and bloody on the floor, it’s a chrysalis, could never contain you again.

If you elect to ball up on the second bed, hugging your treasure, if you choose to let sleep take you—you’ve earned it—then trust that your dreams this time, they’ll be of a slate blue body of water, lapping at a shore.