The Fall of Never(57)

“Let’s eat,” Marie said.



He took Bruce Chalmers’s advice and took a few days off—his first since he began working at NYU Downtown. He spent the first day lounging around the house, reading books, and fixing the busted lock on the bathroom door. When night came and Marie went to soak herself in a warm bath, he crept out onto the back porch with a cigar and suffered the cold. But it was all a show. His absence from the hospital did not ease his tension any; in fact, it only seemed to add an extra layer of apprehension to his condition. Without work, he could think of nothing but Marie and the baby. And no amount of time off was going to make him forget about Nellie Worthridge and what she said.

After his wife and his mother had gone to bed, Mendes once again found himself sitting in the dark study with his hand-held tape recorder on his lap. By now, he’d memorized the old woman’s voice all the way down to her most trivial inflection. And continuing to listen to the recording was not helping him any; rather, it was like a hidden stash to a drug addict: as long as it was in the house, he would have his nightly fix.

And what if Marie sneaks down here one night and catches me listening to it? What if she hears what the old woman says on the tape? Then what? How do I explain it? And moreover, how do I prevent her from becoming just as frightened as I am?

It would feel good to have someone to share the recording with, just so he didn’t have to feel so alone. But he couldn’t bring Marie into it. That wasn’t fair.

Be a man, he thought, and pressed the PLAY button on the recorder.

Static. Silence. Nothing.

He leaned back in his chair toward the window and examined the tape in the moonlight. It was rewound—he could see that—yet it did not play. He tried it a second time, a third time, but there was still nothing.

Partially angry and partially relieved, he assumed he must have carelessly recorded over the tape the last time he’d listened to it.

He’d flushed his own stash.



Despite Dr. Bruce Chalmers’s assurance that both Marie and the baby were in perfect health, Mendes’s nightmares did not ease up.

He found himself in a darkened hallway that smelled vaguely of vinegar. The walls were skewed at uncertain angles, rippling in places, visibly moving, undulating. But it was too dark to see. He took a step closer to one of the walls (felt his foot sink an inch into the quicksand floor) and brought his hand up to the wall to feel for a light switch. The tips of his fingers sank into the fleshy membrane that was the wall, and he could feel a cool menthol liquid coursing down his arm to the crook of his elbow. Disgusted, he quickly withdrew his hand.

There was a dull red light up ahead, but the abstract hallway turned and he could only make out the light’s reflection on the opposite wall. In that light, the consistency of the wall itself resembled the surface of a human tongue…as if he were trapped in some giant’s throat.

He took several dreamlike steps toward the light and the bend in the hallway. With each step, he could feel his bare feet sinking into the moist, pappy surface of the hallway, chilling him. The deeper he moved down the winding, fleshly corridor, the thicker the air grew—wet and heady and stinging his eyes. The reflection of the light on the wall grew more and more intense as he maneuvered through each curve of the hallway, and he thought, This is not a hallway—this is a tunnel.

Up ahead, somewhere in that red light, he could hear a baby crying. It sounded close.

He started to run, but the more effort he put into his movements, the more the ground tried to swallow his feet. Yet he was almost there, almost in the light, almost right there with that baby…

Julian!

A fierce convulsion sent the floor heaving toward the ceiling, sent the walls in on themselves, and he heard himself scream. The intensity of the red light flared to an almost fiery brilliance, then resumed its original muted pulse. A second convulsion rocked him off his feet and sent him head-first onto the ground. Slick moisture splashed his face. On his stomach with his hands splayed out in front of him, bare feet dragging behind, a third convulsion sent him sliding down the tunnel toward the red light. His splayed hands and spread fingers kicked up a gelatinous spray that pattered against his face as he slid.

The infant’s crying grew steadily louder.

He felt himself lose momentum and crash—no, splash—against one of the living walls before tumbling further down the tunnel, and then there he was, at the epicenter of this giant, yet not in the throat, not in the mouth, but in the life force, in the womb, in the center of creation.

The baby and the light were the same creature—not tiny and helpless, but indefinably enormous and alive, each heartbeat like the pounding of a steel drum, like the resonant hum of a live electrical wire…

Julian! Julian!

It was aglow and too bright to stare at. A cloth-like membrane webbing encased it, stretching taut with each spastic movement of the infant creature inside. And it was still crying—mewling—with each exhale of air from its incomplete lungs sending vibrating ripples along the skin of the membrane. It was just so enormous, this titanic infant-creature. Some monster…

This is not a baby, he thought, on the verge of screaming those very words. This is not a baby at all!

There was a blast of moist, stinging heat. A final convulsion caused the red light to burst into a stunning white flame, with the infant-creature’s silhouette directly in the center of that flame, and Mendes felt himself crushed by the mucus-lined walls of the tunnel and forcefully pulled from the womb—