Quicksilver(38)
Sparky retired to his room and I to mine, and Winston wisely remained with Bridget. I don’t know what condition Sparky was in, but after a long day on the run, I felt as though my muscles were sliding off my bones and my joints were coming unhinged.
I took a shower as hot as I could tolerate, toweled off, slipped into pajamas, got into bed—and could not sleep. The quiet abraded my nerves. I knew that no monster stalked me in the dark, and yet the very silence seemed to be evidence of its stealthiness. Minute by minute, I grew increasingly, irrationally convinced that something nearby, coiled to strike, was listening to me as I listened for it.
I turned on a cable channel and lay watching infomercials for spurtles and copper-infused underwear and diarrhea remedies.
This will sound weird, but I suppose no more so than everything that I have written to this point: I didn’t know myself anymore, and I found the new me a little scary. During the course of the day, I’d become a stranger to myself, a different person from the guy who had gotten out of bed to go to work at Arizona! magazine the previous morning. The path to the future that I long envisioned had withered away in the wild woods of recent experience, and I was unable to imagine where this new path might lead. I had killed two federal agents with a car, albeit in self-defense. I was on the run. I was engaged to be married. Sort of. I could see monsters. The world had not changed; however, my understanding of it had undergone a most radical revision, which in turn revised me. I was unsettled by the thought that I was destined to become a warrior. I didn’t see myself as a warrior. I didn’t want to be a warrior. I just wanted to avoid diarrhea, enjoy the health benefits of copper-infused underwear, and have my own little kitchen with a collection of spurtles. However, the mysterious forces at work in my life might give me no choice in the matter. I might have to become a warrior or die. Of course, if I became a warrior, I would almost surely die, because the role did not suit me.
On the other hand, whatever enigmatical power had first taken control of me on the day I’d found the coin seemed to be benign. It manipulated me, yes, but first to prepare me to escape web-spinning spiders from the ISA, and then to send me literally crashing into the life of my stunning and amusing future bride. If I had changed, maybe I needed to change to adapt to the truth of the world in order to survive. And if I was in some strange power’s employ, maybe that employment would be more satisfying than writing about rotting buildings at a ghost crossroads of abandoned highways, even as thrilling as that might be. Maybe I needed to live by the old saying popular with Californians—“Go with the flow”—though that’s exactly what happens to a dead goldfish when you flush it down a toilet.
I left the TV on as a night-light, the volume low, and at last fell asleep during an infomercial for a law firm that was eager to get me the financial settlement I deserved if only I would fall down a long flight of stairs in a commercial enterprise or be so lucky as to find my car rear-ended and simultaneously T-boned by a pair of eighteen-wheelers driven by the reckless employees of a heartless trucking company.
I don’t remember dreaming, and I had no nightmares. In the morning, however, there would be a moment of terror.
At 7:12 a.m., I woke to an infomercial about copper-infused face masks for those who either wanted to be prepared for the next pandemic or had taken a fancy to this stylish head accessory that had been made popular in the previous crisis. This was not yet the aforementioned terror.
Having showered before going to bed, I had only unmentionable bathroom tasks to attend to. As was my habit, I took a book with me. In Phoenix days earlier, when I had been compelled to pack a suitcase to flee I knew not what, I included a memoir by a famous actor. The word “love” was in the title, but judging by the first chapter, the book seemed to be about all the many people whom he hated and why he hated them with such seething passion. Welcome to utopia.
After setting the book on the vanity beside the sink, I washed my hands and shaved with my cordless razor. As I studied my face, vigilantly seeking any missed stubble, my peripheral vision alerted me to the fact that the actor’s memoir did not appear in the mirror. It remained on the counter, but in the reflection, the counter was without a book. My disquiet was related more to perplexity than to fear. I put a hand on the tome, not because I doubted its existence, but as if to rectify the curious difference between reality and the image in the looking glass. With my hand on that memoir, I regarded the mirror again and found that the book I could feel was still absent from the image.
As I stared in disbelief, both I and the motel bathroom around me faded out of the reflection. The mirror became a window into a shadowy subterranean passage only partly revealed by eerie light pulsing from rooms along either side.
What followed seemed like a blend of the real and metaphorical, as if I was drawn into some revelation so complex and profound that the truth of it could not be conveyed by ordinary images and not by words at all, only by resort to visual symbolism of the most extreme and urgent kind, which would speak to my subconscious and provide it with answers that it might understand not now but in the weeks and months to come.
The mirror that had become a window now morphed into a door. I was drawn across that threshold without taking a step, as if I were weightless. I doubt that I went anywhere physically; the sensation of movement was illusory. My viewpoint became that of a video camera mounted on a drone as I plunged through a labyrinth of tunnels wide and narrow, through the warren of chambers they served, through vast caverns and across dark lakes that I knew to be pools of time. The structure changed continuously, a surreal architecture in which every horror ever imagined might lurk in anticipation of being fed what it most relished. Walls of raw earth molded themselves into mortared stone; stone became steel; the steel became organic, a fleshy construct pulsing with menace; flesh became magma, molten and fluid; magma hardened into walls of bones compacted with shattered skulls, acrawl with pale glistening forms that I’d never seen before, which might have been worms or insects or something else unthinkable. There were rooms in which men and women, evidently dead, hung from the walls or else reposed on catafalques, spectral light emanating from their open mouths and breathless nostrils and sunken eyes. In half-lit chambers, people writhed in the grip of grotesque men and women with large misshapen heads, ghouls that were devouring them much as was depicted in the painting by Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children. In bleak passageways, crowds of naked people surged in terror, panicked by some menace behind them or called by something far ahead; sometimes they hurried alongside racing trains of cattle cars, from the slatted sides of which the people within reached out in desperation. In tunnels as smooth as polished wine-dark glass, people flowed by the hundreds, tumbling slowly, as if they were beyond the gravity of Earth. All this occurred in silence, but for the tympanic thunder of my heart, as if I must be in an airless void incapable of conducting sound.