Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (5 page)

And at first he couldn't understand what it was but it was long, taut, and would not part company with his throat so he pulled again until it was out of his mouth and he could see the thing, and then he couldn't believe what he'd done, that it was even possible to do this thing but he had it between his fingers, he was staring at it covered with slime and blood, nearly a foot and a half of the accordion ribbon packed inside his nose.  He'd sneezed it out or coughed it out through his pharynx and now he was holding it like a tiny extra-long tongue and it continued to gag him so he reached for the call-button and pushed and fought the urge to vomit, waiting.

"What in the world have you done?"

It was the pretty nurse, a strong young blonde with a wedding ring, the one who'd admitted him and got him into bed.  She looked as though she didn't know whether to be shocked or angry or amused with him.

"Damned if I know," he said around the ribbon. 
Aaand ithh eye-o
.

He vomited again.  There was a lot of it this time.

"Uh-oh," she said.  "I'm going to call your doctor.  He may have to cauterize whatever's bleeding up in there.  I'll get some scissors meantime, snip that back for you, okay?"

He nodded and then sat there holding the thing.  He shook his head. 
A goddamn bloody nose
.

*****

It occurred to him much later that an operation followed by a hospital stay under heavy medication combined with heavy loss of blood was a lot like drifting through a thick fetal sea from which you occasionally surfaced to glimpse fuzzy snatches of sky.  In his younger days he'd dropped acid while floating in the warm Aegean and there were similarities.  He awoke to orderlies serving food and nurses taking his blood pressure and handing him paper cups of medication.  None of it grounded him for long.  Mostly he slept and dreamed.

He remembered the dreams vividly, huge segments of them crowded spinning inside his head with unaccustomed clarity of detail and feeling--and then he'd seem to blink and they'd be gone, just like that, his mind occupied solely by the business of healing his ruptured body.  Adjusting the new packing to relieve the pressure, swallowing the pill, nibbling the food.  Then hurrying back to dream.

There was something ultimately lonely, he thought, about the process of healing.  Nobody could really help you.  All they could do was be reasonably attentive to your needs.  He began to look forward to his momentary visits from the pretty blonde nurse because of all the hospital staff she seemed the wittiest and most cheerful and he liked her Southern accent, but ultimately he was completely alone in this.  He'd told Annie not to call for a while after her first phone call woke him, he was fine but he was not up to conversation yet.  And that felt lonely too.

When the black man with the haunted eyes appeared in the bed beside him by the window he was not really surprised.  He assumed a lot went on in his room that he wasn't aware of.  He'd looked over at the window to see if it was day or night because as usual he had no idea, no concept of time whatsoever, and there he was lying flat on his back and covered to the chin, hooked up to some sort of monitor and an elaborate IV device of tubes and wires much different from his own, his face thin to emaciation, drawn and grey in the moonlight, eyes open wide and focused in his direction but, Alan thought, not seeing him, or seeing through him--and this he proved with a smile and a nod into the man's wide unblinking gaze.

Possibly some sort of brain damage, he thought, poor guy, knowing somehow that this man's loneliness far exceeded his own, and moments later forgot him and returned to sleep. 

*****

Imagine the seats on a slowly moving Ferris wheel, only the seats are perfectly stable, they don't rock back in forth as the seats on a Ferris wheel do, they remain perfectly steady, and then imagine that they are not seats at all but a set of flat gleaming slabs of thick heavy highly polished glass or metal or even wood, dark, so that it is impossible to tell which--and now imagine that there
is no wheel
--nothing whatever holding them together but the slow steady measured glide itself and  that each is the size and shape of a closet door laid flat, and that there are not only one set but countless sets, intricately moving in and out and past each other, almost but never quite touching, so that you can step up or down or to the side on any of them without ever once losing your footing.

It is like dancing.  It gets you nowhere.  But it's pleasurable.

That was what he dreamed.

He was alone in the dream for quite a while, until Annie appeared, a younger Annie, looking much the same as she did the day he met her, sitting across from him on the plane from L.A. with her two-year-old son beside her, over a dozen years ago.  Her hair was short as it was then as was her skirt and she was stepping toward him in a roundabout way, one step forward and one to the side, drifting over and under him and he wasn't even sure she was aware of his presence, it was as though he were invisible, because she never looked directly at him until she turned and said,
you left us nowhere, you know that?
which was not an accusation but merely a statement of fact and he nodded and began to cry because of course it was true, aside from these infrequent visits and the phone calls and letters he had come unstuck from them somehow, let them fend for themselves alone.

He woke and saw the black man standing in the doorway, peering out into the corridor, turning his head slowly as though searching for someone with those wide empty eyes and he thought for a moment that the man should not be out of  bed, not with all those wires and tubes still attached to him reaching all the way across the room past the foot of his own bed but then heard movement to the other side of the darkened room and turned to see the form of a small squat woman who appeared to be adjusting the instruments, doing something to the instruments, a nurse or a nurse's aide he supposed so he guessed it was all right for the man to be there.  He looked back at him in the doorway and closed his eyes, trying but failing to find his way back into the dream, wanting to explain to Annie the inexplicable.

It was almost dawn when the arm woke him.

He had all but forgotten about the arm, the inflamed swollen tendon that had started him on ibupro
f
en and landed him here in the first place.  The drugs had masked that pain too.  Now the arm jerked him suddenly conscious, jerked hard twice down along his side as though some sort of electric shock had animated it, something beyond his will or perhaps inside his dream, needles of pain from the elbow rising above the constant throbbing wound inside his face.

He guessed more drugs were in order.

He was hurting himself here
.

He pressed the call button and waited for the voice on the intercom.

"Yes?  What can I do for you?"

"I need a shot or a pill or something."

"Pain?"

"Yes."

"I'll tell your nurse."

They were fast, he gave them that.  The pretty blonde nurse was beside him almost instantly, or perhaps despite his pain he'd drifted, he didn't know.  She offered him a paper cup with two bright blue pills inside.

"You hurt yourself awake, did you?"

"I guess.  Yeah, my arm."

"Your arm?"

"Tennis elbow.  Didn't even get to play tennis.  Did it in a gym over a month ago."

She shook her head, smiling, while he took the pill and a sip of water.  "You're not having a real good holiday, are you?"

"Not really, no."

She patted his shoulder.  "You'll sleep for a while now."

When she was gone he lay there waiting for the pain to recede, trying to relax so that he could sleep again.  He turned and saw the black man staring at him as before, and saw that the man now nestled in a thicket of tubes and wires, connected to each of his arms, running under the bedcovers to his legs, another perhaps a catheter, two more patched to his collarbones, one running to his nose and the thickest of them into his half-open mouth.  Behind him lights on a tall wide panel glowed red and blue in the dark.

*****

By m
orning it was gone. All of it.
Alan was lying on his side so that the empty bed and the empty space behind it and the light spilling in from the window were the first things he noticed.

The next thing was the smell of eggs and bacon.  He did his best by the food set in front of him though it was tasteless and none too warm and the toast was hard and dry.  He drank his juice and tea.  When the nurse came in with his pills--a new nurse, middle-aged, black and heavy-waisted, one he'd never seen--he asked her about the man in the bed beside him.

"Nobody beside you," she said.

"What?"

"You been all alone here.  I just came on but first thing I did was check the charts.  Always do.  Procedure.  You're lucky it's summertime, with all the snowbirds gone, or we'd be up to our ears here.  You got the place all to yourself."

"That's impossible.  I saw this guy three times, twice in the bed and once standing right there in the doorway.  He looked terrible.  He was hooked up to all kinds of tubes, instruments."

"'Fraid you were dreaming.  You take a little pain-killer, you take a little imagination, mix and stir.  Happens all the time."

"I'm an appellate lawyer.  I don't
have
an imagination."

She smiled.  "You were all alone, sir, all night long.  I swear."

Some sort of mix-up with the charts, he thought.  The man had been there.  He wasn't delusional.  He knew the difference between dreams and reality.  For now the dreams were the more vivid of the two.  It was still one way to tell them apart.

Wait till the shift changes, he thought.  Ask the other nurse, the blonde.  She'd given him a pill last night.  The black man had been there.  And he was on her watch.

He dreamed and drifted all day long.  Some time during the afternoon Annie and David came by to visit and he told David about coughing up the accordion ribbon and what he'd learned about the color of a vampire shit.  Teenage kids were into things like that he thought, the grosser the better.  That and Annie's cool lips on his forehead were about all he remembered of their visit.  He remembered lunch and dinner, though not what he ate.  He remembered the doctor coming by and that he no longer wore the shorts and polo shirt as he took his pulse and blood pressure but instead the pro forma white lab coat and trousers.  He decided he liked him better the other way.

*****

"Sure," she said.  "I remember.  You hurt yourself awake."

"You remember the guy in the bed beside me?"

"Who?"

"The black man.  I don't know what was wrong with him but he looked pretty bad."

"You know what your doctor's giving you for pain?"

"No."

"It's called hydrocodone, honey.  In the dose you're getting, it's as mean as morphine, only it's not addictive.  I wouldn't be surprised if you told me you were seeing Elvis in that bed over there, let alone some black fella."

*****

He
hurt himself awake
again that night.

This time he was batting at his aching face--at his nose.  He was batting at the culprit, at the source of his misery.  As though he wanted to start himself bleeding again.

What was he doing?  Why was he doing this?

His dream had been intense and strange.  They were alone inside a long grey tube, he and Annie, empty of everything but the two of them and stretching off into some dazzling bright infinity and he was pulling at her clothes, her blouse, her jacket, trying to rouse her and get her to her feet while she crouched in front of him saying nothing, doing nothing, as though his presence beside her meant nothing at all to her one way or another.  He felt frightened, adrift, panicked.

He woke in pain batting at his face and reached for the call-button to call his nurse for yet another pill but the black man's big hand stopped him, fingers grasping his wrist.  The man was standing by his bedside.  The fingers were long and smooth and dry, his grip astonishingly firm.

He looked up into the wide brown eyes that did not seem to focus upon him but instead to look beyond him, into vast distances, and saw the wires and tubes trailing off behind him past the other bed where the squat dark form he realized was no nurse nor nurse's aide hovered over the panel of instruments and a voice inside his head said
no, we're not finished yet, my accident became yours and I'm very much sorry for that but it happens sometimes and for now no interruptions please, we need the facilities, deal with your own pain as I am dealing with mine
and he thought, I'm dreaming, this is crazy, this is the drug but the voice inside said
no, not crazy, only alone in this, alone together here in this room and the nurse cannot see, cannot know, the nurse is not in pain as you and I, you'll only disturb her, you can live with that, can't you
and he nodded yes because suddenly he thought that of course he could. 
Good
, the voice said,
a short time, stop hurting yourself and instead of her, dream of me
,
you've been doing that already but she always gets in, doesn't she
.  He nodded again and felt the pressure lessen on his wrist. 
Stop hurting yourself.  She is not the pain nor are you.  Rest.  Sleep
.