Highways to Hell (14 page)

The sheet of paper was as empty as a stormtrooper’s soul, a white sliver of nothingness coiled like an impotent serpent in the old pawn shop typewriter. A ream of paper sat next to the rickety relic, four-hundred and ninety-nine more blank canvases.

Rafe Martin’s fingers settled once again on the home row keys.

He could feel something swelling within him, a surge of creative energy, and his fingers tingled with the need to shape worlds with words, to journey to places within himself he could only reach via this strange alchemy/interaction of body, mind, and machine. His fingers depressed the keys slightly, the burgeoning need nearly achieving critical mass, but the drive to create ebbed, breaking like a wave on a shore, then finally receding altogether.

He sighed and slumped back in his chair.

A vein in his head throbbed, and he gingerly massaged it, working the fingers of his right hand in slow circles over warm flesh.

He frowned.

It felt like something was moving in there.

Probably just a tactile hallucination brought on by stress and lack of sleep

The frustration he felt at his continuing inability to fashion even one decent sentence was approaching a level dangerous to his mental well-being. Writing was his life’s passion, but right now it was just a burden. He wanted the words to flow in a heady, mad rush of inspiration, the kind of stream-of-consciousness explosion of prose the old beat writers he so admired were famous for.

Rafe lit a cigarette.

He forced his gaze away from the blank sheet. The sun was slanting in through the partially open slats of the mini-blinds, providing the only illumination in the small second bedroom he’d converted into a workspace. He saw the tall spires of the city’s skyline through a haze of smog and refracted light. The city was big and sprawling, a diverse amalgamation of clubs and restaurants, museums and theaters, businesses small and large. Even from here, through the deepening haze, it fairly pulsed with life and vitality.

With endless possibilities.

Rafe stubbed the cigarette out and lurched forward. His fingers pounced on the home row keys and he typed.

THE SLEEPING CITY

by Rafe Martin

The city was trauma. Skyscrapers stabbed the bleeding sky. The rain fell like God’s final judgment, a wash of cleansing acid that scorched the flesh and made the sidewalks sizzle. Predator eyes followed a drowning man into a dive bar.

Blackness like an abyss.

Then, a rattle of glass and the shock of neon--

The door to the office creaked open and Rafe muttered a curse. He wheeled about in the swivel chair to face the intruder.

Balika.

She entered the room smiling and bearing a tray of food. Steaming, spicy Indian stuff that gave Rafe heartburn. The mere thought of ingesting any of it made his stomache rumble and his throat constrict.

Balika’s smile was radiant. “A feast for my sweetie. A nice surprise for my hard-working man.”

She set the tray down on the desk.

Rafe didn’t look at the food.

An incipient fever burned behind his eyes, a wall of fear accompanied by a strange tingling along his hairline. If he didn’t know better, he would swear a colony of fleas was nesting there. There was a faint sensation of…crawling.

Christ, he had to get to bed at a decent hour tonight.

He forced himself to look at the woman who professed to love him.

“There’s this thing we Americans do prior to entering a room, Balika. We knock. It’s considered an act of courtesy, a way of asking
permission
to enter a room.”

Balika’s hands went to her hips as she struck a defiant pose. “Listen buster, I pay the rent here. I pay the bills. I buy the groceries. Unless you want your unemployable butt thrown out on the street, you’ll knock off the snide tone when talking to me.”

Rafe spun away from her and sat facing the view of the city skyline again. Balika continued to rant, but the words barely registered, because he was now consumed with a need that exceeded even his drive to create (which, let’s face it, hadn’t been so strong lately); the need to be gone from this place.

To be somewhere far away from Balika.

The room suddenly felt stifling, confining, a pit of artistic stagnation. He spent too much time in this room. He needed to be
out there
, experiencing the city, filling himself up with the raw material he needed to become something more than a wannabe hack.

He started to rise from the chair, but he felt Balika’s firm hands at his shoulders. She pushed him back down and turned him toward her. Her lovely brown skin looked darker than usual, flushed with the heat of her anger. Despite his own anger, something in Rafe reacted to her raw sensuality. His breathing grew shallow as thoughts of art and transcendence gave way to lust.

Balika was a twenty-three-year-old native of India whose family had moved to the states when she was a little girl. Rafe had met her at a party a year ago, a boring affair he’d been in the process of exiting when he spied her coming in. She was gorgeous, an exotic beauty with long, lustrous brown hair, a lithe, shapely body, soft skin, and the face of an eastern goddess. Never before had he felt so galvanized by the sight of a woman. She met his gaze at the door, smiled, and that was it.

He belonged to her.

How strange to feel the echo of that old feeling now, when the resentment he felt at his “kept man” status was peaking.

She slapped him.

The sting of her hand across his check anesthetized his libido.

“Balika--”

“Shut up.” Her voice stung, a verbal slap. “I will come and go in my own home as I see fit, do you hear me?”

Rafe’s shoulders sagged. “Yes.”

Her gaze went to the typewriter, and an eyebrow rose as she spied the handful of words on the page. She stepped around Rafe, leaned over the desk, and read what he’d written.

She frowned. “Rafe, you write like a constipated Kerouac channeling Raymond Chandler, like a high school boy with a head full of dope and bad poetry. What the fuck does ‘The city was trauma’ mean?”

Rafe bristled. “It’s a…metaphor.”

Who the hell was she to criticize his work? She wasn’t a writer. How dare she presume to tell him anything about artistic matters. She had no appreciation for the flow of language, for the rhythm of prose. She mistakenly believed a handful of college lit courses she’d aced lent her opinions an added authority.

His temple pulsed some more, the vein throbbing like a frayed power line. He felt something shift under the skin, a snake-like slither of movement that made his eyebrows twitch. He pressed the heel of a hand to his brow, vainly trying to ward off what promised to be one wicked bitch of a headache. The need to be away from Balika was back; her caustic commentary masquerading as “constructive criticism” was only making things worse.

She snorted. “Metaphor, my ass. It’s non-sensical. It’s crap.”

Crap.

The word was like a roundhouse blow to his soul, more hurtful by far than the physical aggression of a few moments ago. It was just more evidence of how little she valued their relationship. The truth was she didn’t want an equal partnership. He could point out all the countless times she’d dissuaded him from efforts to find a regular job, but what was the point? She used his current reliance on her against him, as a means of emasculating him, but the truth was she wanted things this way. She didn’t want a boyfriend, really, or a fiancé or husband--she wanted a possession, a plaything.

She was like a grown-up little girl with a living, breathing doll.

Ken with a functional dick.

Rafe hadn’t minded it much at first, but he’d grown weary of the situation. The sex was incredible, but he was starting to believe even that wouldn’t be enough to keep him in this parasitic relationship much longer.

Rafe seethed.

There was just…one…little…problem…with that.

With her encouragement and support, he’d quit his job nearly a year ago to pursue his dream of writing full time. That, coupled with his spotty work history prior to meeting Balika, meant he’d have a hard time finding a job with a good enough income to live on his own. The situation was a classic Catch-22; he couldn’t leave unless he found a good job, and Balika would threaten to kick him out and cut off her monetary support if he started hunting for a job.

Balika was smirking. She folded her arms under her breasts and gazed down at him, her lower lip pooched out in a mockery of a pout. “Oh, did I hurt your feelings, little Rafey? Should Mommy not be so blunt when appraising your…work?”

Rafe glared at her.

It was too much; she was pushing him too hard. “You…”

He struggled to breathe, righteous fury nearly consuming him.

“What was that, Rafey?” She cocked her head sideways and cupped a hand over her ear. More mockery. “I don’t think I heard you. Were you…” Her hand came away from her ear and her face twisted itself into an expression of phony shock. “Oh my, Rafe, were you about to call me a bitch?” Her voice rose on the last word. “Or…or…no, you wouldn’t call me a …
cunt
…would you?”

She gasped and covered her open mouth with her hands.

Rafe ground his teeth, the need to respond in kind, to lash out, was almost overwhelming. The boiling kettle of resentment he felt was about to spill over. Aside from the physical component of their relationship, he hated everything about her. He hated how Americanized she was, how freely she used profanity as a weapon. She maintained a pretense of sweetness until he showed a hint of backbone, then she unleashed a relentless furry of insults.

He gripped the armrests of his chair hard to still the shaking of his hands. His face flushed red and moisture, stress sweat, formed along his hairline.

Oh, how he wanted to make her eat those words.

But he couldn’t.

He was hopeless.

Impotent.

Ineffectual.

Weak.

Tears or sweat, probably both, filled his eyes, and he was momentarily unable to see Balika’s leering face. A blessing, perhaps. But then something moved again behind his forehead, a jarring physical/psychical slippage akin to the shifting of rock strata in an earthquake. His skull seemed to pulse outward, distending like an over-inflated balloon.

He heard a scream.

He wasn’t sure of the source; could’ve been Balika letting loose, but maybe it was his own vocal cords producing that strangled burst of terror.

He felt the flesh around his eye sockets swell to unnatural proportions. There was something moving there, something flowing
out
. He pitched out of the chair, clamped his hands over his throbbing head, and screamed (no doubt of the source this time). He heard the clack of Balika’s heels on the hardwood floor as she backpedaled away from him, heard her shrill, offended voice; “You asshole! You fucking asshole, Rafe! What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you on drugs? Are you fucking high?” Then a groan as the realization that something far worse was happening. “Oh, fuck, don’t you dare stroke out in my house, motherfucker! I’m not gonna take care of your crippled ass, you hear me?”

Rafe screamed again.

His head was a starburst of agony, ground zero for endless, consciousness-obliterating explosions of pain. His nasal passages expanded as something that pulsed heat pushed through them, stretching the skin thin, like a too-small condom rolled over a huge cock. It was the way ropes of molten shit might feel squirting out of his anus. He felt the heat emerge through his nostrils.

Then he could see again.

Twin strands of thick, pink tissue descended from his nose. Ropes of organic matter that twitched and strained. Rafe got a look at eyeless heads with thin-slit, hungry mouths. The things wriggled free of his noise, struck the floor with a wet
plop
, then darted toward Balika.

Now Balika screamed.

She turned to flee, but the brain worms--as Rafe instantly thought of them--were too fast, closing the gap instantly. Rafe saw them race up her bare legs. He shuddered at the sight of them moving under her dress, then again as they emerged through her cleavage and climbed into her mouth and nose. She swatted at the worms and shook her head in a frantic effort to dislodge them.

It was useless.

Her face and forehead swelled as the creatures coiled themselves inside her. She moaned and swayed on her feet as the worms continued to move inside her, jerking her flesh in various directions as they…did whatever they were doing.

Then she tumbled to the floor and lay flat on her back.

Rafe was too numb to feel horror, grief or anything else for several minutes. He was stunned by the blatant impossibility of what had just occurred. For a while, his mind flat-out refused to acknowledge the reality of the event. It was the kind of scenario dreamed up by hack horror writers going for cheap shocks. What he had just witnessed just didn’t happen in the everyday, rational world.