What the Hell Did I Just Read

  “It sounds like a Dude, Where’s My Car? situation to me.”

  “No, I mean why we’d need to talk to Loretta specifically.”

  Amy said, “Well, I think Loretta has Maggie. Or”—Amy made one set of air quotes with her fingers—“she has ‘Maggie.’”

  John said, “Oh. Right.”

  I said, “So, we just have to go and, uh, explain the situation. She’ll understand, right?”

  John said, “You think twenty silicone sex butts would convince her?”

  17. JOINING MAGGIE FOR BREAKFAST

  The three of us headed to Loretta’s house, but had decided that we wouldn’t stop if Ted’s car was parked there, since we assumed he still was determined to shoot me on sight.

  No Impala. Still, we took the minor precaution of parking at Taco Bill instead of in front of Loretta’s house. The restaurant had a spray-painted sign in the window that said:

  STILL OPEN

  FUCK THE FLOOD

  … though it looked like they had maybe forty-eight hours before the cooks would be standing in puddles while they grilled the flank steak. Cars were creeping down the street, swerving out across the painted lines to avoid the overflowing gutters.

  To John, I said, “So, this meeting you had with the NON agent Friday night. You’ve no recollection of it?”

  “Well, you know how it is on the Sauce. You see things. Seems like a dream, or the memories from when you’re a little kid, the ones where you’re not sure if they happened or if your brain just cobbled the memory together after you’d heard the story secondhand. So, I have this memory of running out of the Beanie Wienie building and I think, ‘I need transportation.’ Then this guy on a crotch rocket Suzuki motorcycle—just like the one I owned years ago—rides up and asks if I’m John, says he got a letter five years ago telling him to deliver a motorcycle to that specific place and time. So, I jump on and I ride and I run into the NON convoy. I somehow know which truck has Agent Pussnado in the back—”

  Amy said, “Excuse me, who?”

  “The agent we just talked to? Anyway, I jump off the motorcycle onto the hood of the truck—no, this is how I remember it—and they screech to a stop and I yell at the driver that I need to talk to her, that it’s for everyone’s safety. She lets me in the back of the truck and it’s just me and her. I tell her I need five minutes, she says she needs eight inches.”

  Amy said, “Oh my god.”

  I said, “That is not what happened.”

  “That’s how I remember it, I swear!”

  “Do you remember anything else from when you were out? Anything that’s not completely fucking stupid? Anything about Loretta, or Maggie, anything that would help prepare us for what we’re about to walk into here?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. You?”

  “No. I had a vision I ran into Nymph and he tried to tell me the meaning of life, then I woke up.”

  Amy said, “Anyway. Obviously I have to go in again, because I assume Maggie and Loretta both still think you’re the kidnapper.”

  “You’re not going in there alone. Not after what happened last time. If we have to just barge in and do it by force, we will.”

  Amy said, “Do what by force?”

  “Take out Maggie?”

  “The sign said ‘Talk to Loretta,’ not ‘Murder Loretta’s child.’”

  “It’s not a child!”

  “We don’t know that yet. Look, you guys feel free to keep debating it, I’m going in. I’ll stick my phone in my coat pocket and you can watch—”

  I said, “But what if Maggie turns into—”

  “Shh. Let me finish. The danger isn’t Maggie turning into a big snake monster or something, the danger is she messes with my brain somehow. If she turns into a big monster I’ll scream and run away. If she starts messing with my head, you guys will need to get me out of there and slap sense into me.”

  I said, “I don’t like it either way.”

  “Sure, and you can sit out here and contemplate how much you don’t like it while I go inside.” She opened the door. “Love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  We watched from afar as Amy’s red coat bounced through the rain. She knocked on Loretta’s door, then apparently got an okay to come in. I started watching on my phone, but didn’t have a great view—the camera was just barely peeking up over the pocket of her coat. Amy pushed in through the door and appeared to be responding to a friendly greeting that I couldn’t quite hear over the rustling of her coat against the microphone.

  I said, “I don’t like this.”

  John said, “Yeah, I think you said something about that. We’ll give her one minute, then we bust in.”

  Amy entered the living room. We could faintly hear Loretta talking from the kitchen, saying, “… actually she’s handling it better than the grown-ups. But you know, kids are tough. John was here yesterday, he explained everything. I know you’re trying to help, despite what Ted thinks. And now all those other kids are missing … awful.”

  Amy said, “Oh, I didn’t know John had come by. What, uh, did he explain, exactly?”

  On Amy’s camera, we watched Loretta step into view, holding a mug of coffee.

  Half of her was missing.

  She looked like she’d been torn apart by a great white. Most of her neck was gone, to the point that it should have been impossible for her to hold her head upright—just a white spinal column and a yellowish ligament surrounded by ragged meat and open air. About a third of her torso had been ripped away, from armpit to hip.

  She continued talking like everything was fine. I could see her windpipe twitching, her exposed lung inflating and deflating with each breath.

  That woman should not be alive.

  John gave a start and I knew he could see it, too. But Amy replied politely to the conversation, oblivious.

  Loretta said, “John told me the police had turned you loose, that the bad guy had the same build and hair color as your David but that they’d eliminated him as a suspect. Still, I’d prefer he not come in. Maggie is still in bed but I don’t want to scare her. So, what do you need?” Through the video feed I watched as the woman’s stomach twitched and quivered as it digested some bit of breakfast.

  Amy said, “I’m not sure. You know, we’re still just trying to help however we can…”

  “Well, I know there’s more to this,” said Loretta, causing a little flap of skin to bounce around her throat. “Maggie wasn’t acting right, before the abduction, I mean. I know this was something … unusual.”

  Amy said, “Has Maggie acted strangely since she’s come back?”

  “Not considering what she’s been through, you know.”

  “Can I see her?”

  Loretta invited Amy to follow her to Maggie’s bedroom, and the camera tracked the mutilated woman down the hall. She opened a bedroom door a crack and said, “Mags? You awake?”

  The answer that came from the bedroom was a terrifying guttural squeal. John glanced at me. Amy reacted like she heard an adorable child’s voice and said, “Oh, you can just let her sleep. I didn’t intend to—”

  Loretta said into the bedroom, “I have someone who wants to see you, real quick. Won’t be one minute.”

  “KREEEEE … KUKUKUKUKUK!”

  “It’s okay, she’s helping the police.”

  “EEEEUUUUK. Eeeeeee…”

  Loretta pushed the door open.

  Lying on the bed was a maggot.

  It was approximately the same size as a human child. Its skin was translucent and I could see its digestive system working, grinding up what looked like scraps of meat and leather.

  John said, “Huh.”

  I said, “I’m going in—”

  “Wait.”

  Amy said, “Maggie?” and moved gingerly into the room. The view from the phone leaned over the bed. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Maggie” screeched and clucked and made sucking noises.

&nb
sp; Loretta sat down on the bed with “Maggie” and the creature squished its way over to her. The mother laid her hand across the maggot’s back, the monster’s face resting a circular row of teeth against Loretta’s abdomen.

  “I’m just so happy to have her back home. My heart breaks for the other parents missing their babies today but I have to admit, I’m selfish. I’m happy to have Maggie back and above all else, I want to make sure they never try to take her again. If you guys can help me with that, nothing else matters.”

  I knew that the lingering effects of the Soy Sauce were the difference between what John and I were seeing versus everyone else—if I concentrated, I found I could actually see the formation of fuckroaches swarming around the maggot, twitching and writhing in the vague shape of a girl. If I concentrated a bit more, I could see the little blond girl they were projecting to the rest of the world, the child Amy was seeing, the one that had been woven into all of Loretta Knoll’s memories. Then in a blink it was back to the larva. Hungry, pulsing.

  “Maggie” opened her slimy mouth and took a bite out of Loretta’s belly, ripping skin and fat and chewing noisily. Loretta didn’t even flinch.

  BOOK III

  An Excerpt from Fear: Hell’s Parasite by Dr. Albert Marconi

  There used to be a famous thought experiment that went something like this:

  A child is born blind. She has in her possession two wooden toys—a ball and a block. After years of playing with both, she knows the contours of each object intimately by touch—the sphere and the cube. Then, late in childhood, she is given surgery to correct her eyesight. Now that she can see for the first time, would this young lady be able to distinguish the block from the ball on sight alone?

  I say this “used” to be a thought experiment, because we now know the answer: no. Real subjects who have had their sight restored, upon seeing a cube for the first time, cannot connect it with the eight pointy corners they remember feeling in their hands. They fully expect it to feel like the smooth sphere, until they hold it and learn otherwise.

  The lesson? You do not see with your eyes. You see with your brain.

  The visual data that enters your optic nerve is meaningless noise without the brain’s ability to overlay meaning upon it. This means, quite simply, that what you see (in a real, not metaphorical, sense) is a result of what you have been built to see, and nothing more. If you would like a comparison, imagine the family dog lying in a room while its masters watch a film on television. Dogs cannot see television (their eyes are quite different from yours) so all they know is that the humans in the room are sitting motionless, staring listlessly at a noisy square object on the wall. The canine may note voices or other familiar sounds from that device, but because those sounds are not accompanied by smells, they do not represent anything of interest to it. Even if the dog could learn to converse with humans, it would be next to impossible to explain to the animal that the motionless, silent people in the room are interacting with other living beings located thousands of miles away, performing actions that actually occurred years earlier. Which is to say, the family and the dog are in the same room, but experiencing very different realities.

  The very next day, the family takes that dog for a walk in the park. They are amused at how their pet frantically sniffs patches of grass, enthralled by seemingly nothing at all. They are mystified at its obsession with smelling the anuses of other dogs, yanking on its leash and discouraging it from indulging what they figure must be a curious fetish. How could the dog ever explain that its sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive than theirs, that it can, in mere seconds, sniff out an entire life-or-death drama that played out in that very patch of empty grass weeks earlier? One whiff told the hound that an animal had recently urinated there, that said animal’s metabolism was failing, and that it was extremely frightened. A sniff of another dog’s posterior spells out its entire biography—its age, success as a hunter, its suitability as a mate and/or likelihood of winning a fight to the death.

  Same park. Two different realities.

  This is despite the fact that man and canine both evolved in the same environment, with extremely similar biology. Now imagine the difference between two beings who evolved in different worlds entirely.

  Knowing my line of work, I suppose you have already guessed why this is relevant to my interests. If a being from another universe were to appear in ours, our ability to understand it would be exactly as limited as the formerly blind teenager trying to identify his or her beloved toys by sight alone. Our brains would paw around madly for some context to make sense of the entity but, finding none, would frantically try to construct a crude analog. Some of us would see demons, some would see aliens, some would see nothing at all.

  When those conflicting impressions clash with one another, well, you need only to open a history book to see the result. We will live and die according to how we interpret the unfamiliar. All of human culture is nothing more than that very process, playing out again and again.

  18. ONCE AGAIN, MARCONI SELFISHLY TRIES TO STEAL THE SPOTLIGHT

  Amy slid back into the Jeep, took one look at our faces, and said, “What?”

  I said, “I don’t know how to put this, but while Maggie appears to you as an adorable eight-year-old child, she is in reality a huge carnivorous larva that is slowly eating her mother.”

  Amy said, “I guess I don’t have to ask if that’s just a metaphor. So during your drug trip, you left yourself a note to come here, so you could see that, right? So now what?”

  “We have to kill it, Amy.”

  “You’re going to kill Maggie in front of her mother? You’d have to kill Loretta, too.”

  “No. I guess we’d have to get her away from here…”

  “Kidnap her, you mean. As in, the thing you were accused of doing in the first place. Will you listen to yourself?”

  “Amy, it’s a larva. That means it’s going to grow into something, right? We can’t let some monster hatch and go on a rampage through the city. Again.”

  “Okay, let me ask you this. You see one thing, me and Loretta see another. How do we know your version is right?”

  “Is this like some kind of Socratic thought experiment? We already know it’s a monster. I mean, you see a girl but it’s actually a monster.”

  “But I talked to her.”

  “So?”

  “She was able to think and express feelings. Fear, affection, all that. Why doesn’t she qualify for all the same protections we’d afford to a human who can do the same thing?”

  John said, “You didn’t see what we saw. That thing is killing Loretta. Eating away at her. Like, taking literal bites from her flesh. I don’t even know how she’s still walking around.”

  “She looked fine to me. Looked exhausted, but relieved.”

  I said, “All right, this is exactly what you were afraid would happen. Do you need us to slap sense into you now? Just know that I intend to do the slapping on your butt. Slowly.”

  “If I’m not thinking clearly, show me where I’m wrong, I’ll listen. In Loretta’s mind, it absolutely is her daughter. Did you see the look on her face? That love, it was real. You kill Maggie, that loss she’ll feel, that’ll be real, too. Same as if you actually killed her kid.”

  I said, “Maybe after the thing dies, the spell will be broken, like it was with Mikey. Let’s put it to a vote.”

  Amy said, “My vote is that I’m not going to let you do it no matter how you vote.”

  “That’s not how democracy wo—”

  John’s phone chimed an e-mail notification.

  “Oh, hey, it’s Marconi. He says he got the specimen and wants to talk about it. Wants to know if we can do a Skype call.”

  “What specimen?”

  John shrugged. “I guess we sent him something? While we were tripping?”

  “That doesn’t sound like something we’d do. And by that I mean it sounds like a really good idea.”

  Amy said, “That settl
es it. We go back to my laptop and talk to Dr. Marconi and we do that instead of murdering this child.”

  I said, “For now. But if in the interim Maggie hatches and eats an orphanage, it’s on you.”

  Amy

  They were several blocks from Loretta Knoll’s modest rental house before Amy felt her guts start to loosen up just a little.

  This whole thing was giving her flashbacks.

  After the car accident that killed her parents and mangled her left hand, Amy had stayed with her Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty for three long, nightmarish years. The couple’s marriage had always been a tire fire and Amy could feel the tension crackling in the air every time she walked in the door. The two of them hated each other. They devoted all of their energy to inventing reasons to be outraged, each desperate to be the wronged party at any given moment, as if they were both keeping track on a scoreboard they kept under the bed. Adding Amy to the mix had been the proverbial bottle rocket to the hornet’s nest. The aunt was the blood relative, Amy’s mother’s sister, and it had been her decision to take Amy in. Aunt Betty then kept insinuating that Uncle Bill had sexual urges for their fourteen-year-old houseguest. Betty had known it wasn’t true, it was just the worst thing she could think to accuse him of. That’s how it worked.

  Still, this meant that Amy couldn’t just stay out of their vicious arguments, because she was now a party to them. She was also the only one of the three who didn’t seem to thoroughly enjoy the conflict. The tension made her physically ill. She wasn’t used to it. Her parents had been best friends, her father an enormous man with smiling eyes who had once spent six hours driving a young Amy from store to store trying to find a copy of Final Fantasy II for the SNES. His little princess.

  But at Bill and Betty’s, if there was ever to be peace for an evening, it would only be because Amy had devoted all of her energy to maintaining it, moment to moment. She would see signs of conflict on the horizon—say, noticing Aunt Betty had bought Wonder Bread instead of Bunny, Bill’s preferred brand—and 100 percent of the burden for smoothing it over would fall on her. The bread-brand controversy had once resulted in Bill smashing a plate against a table and slicing his hand open on one of the shards. Amy remembered on one occasion throwing on her coat in the middle of winter and walking to a grocery store five blocks away, seeing they didn’t have a loaf of Bunny Bread on the shelf, and bursting into tears right there in the aisle. The next morning she had stood there in the kitchen with a ball of heavy acid in her guts as she watched Uncle Bill go to make toast. He uttered a sarcastic grunt when he noticed the brand … and that was it, he just proceeded to make breakfast like normal.