I rest my life on the darkness. I lay down my soul. I am nothing.
Last month, I was arrested. I hadn't paid rent or bills for three months, and one day the police came. I was inspelling when they arrived. They thought I was in a coma. So I was taken to a hospital and from there I was brought here to this narrow bed in this empty room. They say I'm crazy. I've tried to explain about inspelling and how the mind is a condensation of the Field. But my explanations do sound like madness.
I don't know yet why this has happened to me. But the knowledge is here somewhere. The knowledge is always here. Like inertia, holding us in place, keeping us whole.
I'm sure my imprisonment will end soon. I sense an ending that will clarify all beginnings. I tease the
guards and staff with a cartoon personification I've begun doodling everywhere: Alfred Omega, a voltlegged imp with with powers strong as a god's.
Look, I tell them-I tell you-there are ghost holes all around us.
And inside us! They are carrying us down the years. And as we go, anything can happen.
Living in the world, life is home,
death is life
having its way with us, and pain is the piece of our mind we give
back.
-excerpts from The Decomposition Notebook by Zeke Zhdarnov
Quills of stratus clouds glowed red in the purple sky, and several meteors flicked over the streetlighttrellised skyline of Ridgefield, Indiana. From the toolshed on the knolly backland of his farm, Gareth Brewster could see across the dark lumpy hills to the town's business center. He worked there in a bank as the credit-card manager. And at the end of the day, he liked to walk out to the toolshed on the grassy hummock and look at the bright amulet of the city.
Gareth had been doing that for years. now. But this one night was somehow like no other. The ambered horizon beneath the last sliver of the hatched moon mesmerized him. The wind smelled of the meadows-and something new, a thin line of acrid burning. At first, he thought that was .the industry at Gary, and he fulminated mentally about writing the environmental board .... His thoughts stilled. The wind wasn't blowing from Gary.
The brittle stink blew louder, and Gareth turned to follow its direction. He looked up at the glassy stars saw another needle of meteor light-and waded through the long grass after the scent. It thickened to a vile billow near the woodshed. The door was slightly ajar, and the grass leading to it from the road was recently pressed down. He stared to see if there was a fire. Not seeing smoke or flames, he turned and jogged back across the feld to his house.
His wife was in the kitchen. He waved as he passed and went straight to the garage. When he came out with a shovel and a lantern, she had the window open.
'What are you doing, honey?' she asked.
`An animal got into the toolshed,' he replied. 'I'll be right back.'
'Leave it till morning.'
`And have it topple the workbench and all my tools? No, I'd better. take care of it now.'
'Those tools have been sitting there for months. They can wait till morning.'
Gareth ignored her and loped over the soft land to the shed.
The stink was gone. No-there it was, only slimmer now. The air seemed to pulse with it when he stood before the door to the toolshed. He nudged it open with the shovel and shone the lantern in. .
The workbench with its spread of tools was untouched.
Gareth entered and swung the light around. In the far corner of the rectangular room, a tall black bale leaned. His eyes skittered to see what it was. Closer up, it looked like the back of a hunched-over gorilla. It shivered, and the air quaked with a charred stench.
Gareth gasped and lurched about to leave. From the raftered ceiling, a shadow scuttled. Gareth stopped to see what it was, and a writhing spider, big as his hand, dropped into the beam of his lantern, Gareth swung at it with the shovel, and it snagged the edge of
the spade with its crablike legs and spurted down the length of the wood handle to his arm.
With a shout, he dropped the shovel, but too late. The thing was on him! In his terror to swat it off; he dropped the lantern. It rocked to its side and filled the room with an orange, fractured light.
Almost instantly, the spider dashed over his shoulder and onto his back. .With flailing arms, Gareth tried to brush it off while he rushed to the door. Its legs scratched .the back of his neck and tangled in his hair, and as he reached for it, the thorns spurring the creature's long front legs stabbed his wrists. He slammed into the doorjamb, and spun about to see the black shivering bale in the corner lean over and reveal a glistening blue slugface, frothing with a putrescent ferment of juices. The sight of it made him scream.
The spider gripping the back of his head shimmied tight against his nape, and its powerful beak jabbed him, piercing his skull with a sound like the crunch of gravel. Its probe needled into his brain, and jagged electric colors tore through Gareth with a searing agony. His body thrashed, and his brain went rubbery. He couldn't move. He couldn't yell.
But then he was moving. Through the jackhammer throb of his hurt, through the sheets of flame snapping within him, he saw himself weightlessly rising to his feet and sleepwalking toward the slugfaced thing in the corner.
Horror was a mote in the hugeness of his pain. The very grip of his skull seemed a mere bauble in an ocean of boiling. Freezing torment scalded him, and he was floating through it to the mucus-webbed fibrils of the thing. His body bent at the waist, and his face fit into the quivering maw of the slugface.
The racheting anguish of his body stropped sharper, walloping him to an excruciating pitch of dying.
