The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (16 page)

Or, rather, when I notice what’s growing
on
the walls. I’m fairly confident I’ve never seen anything with precisely that texture before. It half reminds me (but only half) of the rubbery blades and stipes of kelp. It’s almost the same color as kelp, too, some shade that’s not quite brown, nor green, nor a very dark purple. It glimmers wetly, as though it’s sweating, or secreting, mucus. I stop and stare, simultaneously alarmed and amazed and revolted. It
is
revolting, extremely so, this clinging material covering over and obscuring almost everything. I look up and see that it’s also growing on the ceiling. In places, long tendrils of it hang down like dripping vines. Dr. Teasdale, I
want
so badly to describe these things, this waking nightmare, in much greater detail. I want to describe it perfectly. But, as I’ve said, words fail. For that matter, memory fades. And there’s so much more to come.

A few thick drops of the almost colorless mucus drip from the ceiling onto my visor, and I gag reflexively. The sensors in my EVA suit respond by administering a dose of a potent antiemetic. The nausea passes quickly, and I use my left hand to wipe the slime away as best I can.

I follow the corridor, going very slowly because the mist is only getting denser and, as I move farther away from the airlock, I discover that the stuff growing on the walls and ceiling is also sprouting from the deck plates. It’s slippery and squelches beneath my boots. Worse, most of the path lighting is now buried beneath it, and I switch on the magspots built into either side of my helmet. The beams reach only a short distance into the gloom.

“You’re almost there,” Amery says, Amery or the AI speaking with her stolen voice. “Ten yards ahead, the corridor forks. Take the right fork. It leads directly to the transhab module.”

“You want to tell me what’s waiting in there?” I ask, neither expecting, nor actually desiring, an answer.

“Nothing is waiting,” Amery replies. “But there are many things we would have you see. There’s not much time. You should hurry.”

And I do try to walk faster, but, despite the suit’s stabilizing exoskeleton and gyros, almost lose my footing on the slick deck. Where the corridor forks, I go right, as instructed. The habitation module is open, the hatch fully dilated, as though I’m expected. Or maybe it’s been left open for days or months or years. I linger a moment on the threshold. It’s so very dark in there. I call out for Amery. I call out for anyone at all, but this time there’s no answer. I try my comms again, and there’s not even static. I fully comprehend that in all my life I have never been so alone as I am at this moment, and, likely, I never will be again. I know, too, with a sudden and unwavering certainty, that Amery Domico is gone from me forever, and that I’m the only human being aboard
Pilgrimage.

I take three or four steps into the transhab, but stop when something pale and big around as my forearm slithers lazily across the floor directly in front of me. If there was a head, I didn’t see it. Watching as it slides past, I think of pythons, boas, anacondas, though, in truth, it bears only a passing similarity to a snake of any sort.

“You will not be harmed, Merrick,” Amery says from a speaker somewhere in the darkness. The voice is almost reassuring. “You must trust that you will not be harmed, so long as you do as we say.”

“What was that?” I ask. “On the floor just now. What was that?”

“Soon now, you will see,” the voice replies. “We have ten million children. Soon, we will have ten million more. We are pleased that you have come to say goodbye.”

“They want to know what’s happened,” I say, breathing too hard, much too fast, gasping despite the suit’s ministrations. “At Jupiter, what happened to the ship? Where’s the crew? Why is
Pilgrimage
in orbit around Mars?”

I turn my head to the left, and where there were once bunks, I can only make out a great swelling or clot of the kelp-like growth. Its surface swarms with what I, at first, briefly mistake for maggots.

“I didn’t
come
to say goodbye,” I whisper. “This is a retrieval mission, Amery. We’ve come to take you…” and I trail off, unable to complete the sentence, too keenly aware of its irrelevance.

“Merrick, are you beginning to see?”

I look away from the swelling and the wriggling things that aren’t maggots and take another step into the habitation module.

“No, Amery. I’m not. Help me to see. Please.”

“Close your eyes,” she says, and I do. And when I open them again, I’m lying in bed with her. There’s still an hour or so left before dawn, and we’re lying in bed, naked together beneath the blankets, staring up through the apartment’s skylight. It’s snowing. This is the last night before Amery leaves for Cape Canaveral, the last time I see her, because I’ve refused to be present at the launch or even watch it online. She has her arms around me, and one of the big, ungainly hovers is passing low above our building. I do my best to pretend that its complex array of landing beacons are actually stars.

Amery kisses my right cheek, and then her lips brush lightly against my ear. “We could not understand, Merrick, because we were too far and could not remember,” she says, quoting Joseph Conrad. The words roll from her tongue and palate like the spiraling snowflakes tumbling down from that tangerine sky. “We were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign, and no memories.”

Once, Dr. Teasdale, when Amery was sick with the flu, I read her most of
The Heart of Darkness
. She always liked when I read to her. When I came to that passage, she had me press highlight, so that she could return to it later.

“The earth seemed unearthly,” she says, and I blink, dismissing the illusion. I’m standing near the center of the transhab now, and in the stark white light from my helmet, I see what I’ve been brought here to see. Around me, the walls leak, and every inch of the module seems alive with organisms too alien for any earthborn vernacular. I’ve spent my adult life describing artifacts and fossil bones, but I will not even attempt to describe the myriad of forms that crawled and skittered and rolled through the ruins of
Pilgrimage.
I would fail if I did, and I would fail utterly.

“We want you to know we had a choice,” Amery says. “We want you to know that, Merrick. And what is about to happen, when you leave this ship, we want you to know that is also of our choosing.”

I see her, then, all that’s left of her, or all that she’s become. The rough outline of her body, squatting near one of the lower bunks. Her damp skin shimmers, all but indistinguishable from the rubbery substance growing throughout the vessel. Only, no, her skin is not so smooth as that, but pocked with countless oozing pores or lesions. Though the finer features of her face have been obliterated – there is no mouth remaining, no eyes, only a faint ridge that was her nose – I recognize her beyond any shadow of a doubt. She is rooted to that spot, her legs below the knees, her arms below the elbow, simply vanishing into the deck. There is constant, eager movement from inside her distended breasts and belly. And where the cleft of her sex once was…I don’t have the language to describe what I saw there. But she bleeds life from that impossible wound, and I know that she has become a daughter of the oily black cloud that
Pilgrimage
encountered near Ganymede, just as she is mother and father to every living thing trapped within the crucible of that ship, every living thing but me.

“There isn’t any time left,” the voice from the AI says calmly, calmly but sternly. “You must leave now, Merrick. All available resources on this craft have been depleted, and we must seek sanctuary or perish.”

I nod and turn away from her, because I understand as much as I’m ever going to understand, and I’ve seen more than I can bear to remember. I move as fast as I dare across the transhab and along the corridor leading back to the airlock. In less than five minutes, I’m safely strapped into my seat on the taxi again, decoupling and falling back towards
Yastreb-4.
A few hours later, while I’m waiting out my time in decon, Commander Yun tells me that
Pilgrimage
has fired its main engines and broken orbit. In a few moments, it will enter the thin Martian atmosphere and begin to burn. Our AI has plotted a best-guess trajectory, placing the point of impact within the Tharsis Montes, along the flanks of Arsia Mons. He tells me that the exact coordinates, -5.636 ° N, 241.259 ° E, correspond to one of the collapsed cavern roofs dotting the flanks of the ancient volcano. The pit named Jeanne, discovered way back in 2007.

“There’s not much chance of anything surviving the descent,” he says. I don’t reply, and I never tell him, nor anyone else aboard the
Yastreb-4
, what I saw during my seventeen minutes on
Pilgrimage.

And there’s no need, Dr. Teasdale, for me to tell
you
what you already know. Or what your handlers know. Which means, I think, that we’ve reached the end of this confession. Here’s the feather in your cap. May you choke on it.

Outside my hospital window, the rain has stopped. I press the call button and wait on the nurses with their shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with grey, their jet sprays and hollow needles filled with nightmares and, sometimes, when I’m very lucky, dreamless sleep.

They – THEY – are not quite beyond description, though it may be my words are not equal to the task. It may or not be. All too often, words fail me, no matter how often or overused that phrase might be.
May…might…not quite…
already I am falling back on uncertainty. Is that a rigorous, almost scientific qualification, or is it a cop out? Don’t ask, because I don’t know. I only know that each time I see them, they are not quite beyond description, even if I have never before attempted to describe them. THEM.

I always think of them
in
all caps, since that very first night, though I cannot say why. I cannot put my finger on why. Another hoary old chestnut, there. Yes,
chestnut.
There’s a tiresome, stale joke here, whether it is
visible
or not; I know it in my mind. My mind’s eye. Can I compose an entire document of clichés? Has anyone ever tried?

The first time I saw them it was on a sunny summer’s day. Never in the morning, evening nor at night, though I have looked for them then. And never in any season but summer, and never on cloudy or overcast days. Those days in New England when the sky is startlingly blue. So, I imagine there is some correlation between their appearance on those days (season, weather, time of day) and their propensity for moving about in the open. Or. At all other times, some peculiarity of their physiology, biochemistry, whatnot, renders them invisible to the human eye. Or my eyes, at least.

Almost always, I am lying alone in bed, or having tea neat at the little table (Queen-Anne style, oval two-board top over a square skirt, tapering legs ending in pad feet, my mother’s and her mother’s before her) by the dining room window, or pulling weeds in the garden, when they appear. Several, or only one. I look up, and IT or THEY are standing some distance away. Sometimes peering in through a window, sometimes watching from a considerable distance, other times striding about in the near distance. Never have they made any threatening gesture towards me. I will not say I am the only person ever to have seen them, for I can’t possibly know that. I can say that no one else has ever been with me when I have seen them.

Then again, I’m a solitary sort. That’s easy, out here on the island. No one much ever comes by, except the mailman and my only close friend, Chelsea. I rarely call her Chelsea, preferring a private joke, Cheshire, as she is given to unannounced visits and abrupt departures. Which makes her not so unalike them, doesn’t it? She doesn’t seem to mind being called Cheshire. Or, if she does, has never come out and said as much. She is a pretty woman, Cheshire, past forty-five, but still somehow girlish. I have never told her of my crush on her, never even hinted. But I have wished, on occasion, that she were not straight, that she did not have a husband and two children. That she would come to live with me in my cottage and share my bed. Then, she might see them, too.

I have read of “window fallers,” which are said to be creatures and/or beings (“fallers”) that occasionally enter our universe via breaches (“windows”) between our cosmos and other dimensions or parallel universes. It is the sort of phrase created by this or another person who believes in UFOs, Bigfoot, astrology, that the pyramids were constructed by ancient astronauts.
That
sort. Oh, if they could see what I have seen. But, yes. “Window fallers.” It has been suggested that such tall tales as
la Bête du Gévaudan
, the Mothman of Pleasant Point, West Virginia, and Spring-Heeled Jack are all examples of “window fallers.” I know some would be eager to place Them in the same dubious category. Only,
they
are not tall tales to scare children and keep lunatics busy. They are as real as am I. As is Cheshire, with her dimples and green eyes. Or the sunflowers and snapdragons in my garden.

The china cups in my cabinets.

The sun in the sky.

I’d never call them “stick figures.” I suppose someone else might, but I wouldn’t. True, they seem hardly more substantial than that at first glance, but when you’ve seen them as frequently as I have, and always in the broad daylight, it’s plain the phrase would be inaccurate. They stride on very long legs, their arms – almost as long as their legs – swinging slightly at their sides. I have not yet seen one bend over. Yes, they have faces, but those can only be glimpsed if one or several are very, very close, in part because “neck” and “head” are exactly the same circumference and diameter.

They move slowly and with an exquisite grace.

“You should get out more,” Cheshire says to me on a bright Saturday morning in September. “You should take the ferry. Go shopping.”

My groceries come once a week, brought by a delivery boy – well, a girl, usually, the grocer’s daughter. Her name is Polly. I didn’t think anyone named their daughters Polly anymore, and I have almost asked several times why her parents chose the name. Polly is a nickname for Mary, by way of another nickname for Mary, Molly. So, her Christian name is probably Mary. Polly, Mary, Molly. It almost makes a children’s rhyme, for hopscotch or jumping rope.

 “We could go to a movie,” Cheshire says.

Though, she knows I don’t care for movies. I don’t even own a television. I’m happy enough with my books.

She once tried to get me to attend the Blessing of the Fleet in South County, at Galilee, to go along with her. But I have never liked crowds, and I’m not sure God offers divine protection to fishermen. Or much of anyone else. I don’t believe that’s the way it works. I’d told her all of this, and more besides, and she lamented the days when I lived in South Kingstown and taught high-school history and geography to the hooligans that pass for students these days. She lamented those days, even though she didn’t meet me until after I’d retired and moved out to the island, taking up residence in this cottage I inherited from my mother.

“You don’t know how I lived back then.”

“I bet,” she said, stirring cream into her steaming cup of Darjeeling. “I would bet you more outgoing back then.”

“I wasn’t,” I assured her. Though, that was a bald-faced lie. Not that I want to give the impression that I lie very often, because I don’t.

I will begin with the first time I saw one of them. I was having a nap(as I often do around two in the afternoon, rarely sleeping more than an hour). I awoke at five after three (by the clock on the wall). One of them was looking in at me through the window. Oh, I have not said that I have my bedroom in the tiny attic of the cottage. As a child it was mine, and when I moved back in, I honestly could imagine sleeping nowhere else. It still has the same calico wallpaper. It has only a single window, with a southeastern view, looking out towards Mohegan Bluffs and Corn Cove and the open Atlantic beyond, and, if you think about it, the shores of Africa far, far away. At any rate, I awoke, and it was gazing in at me with its narrow face, those eyes black as raven feathers, the slit of a mouth, the place where nostrils ought to be but aren’t. I still think it odd that I was not the least bit frightened, or even surprised, by the sight. As if I’d been expecting it all along. It watched me and blinked several times, but its face was entirely expressionless. Its skin (like all its kind) was dark, a shade of black-grey that put me in mind of the graphite in a pencil.

“Window fallers.” Well, it was at my window, yes, though I am aware that’s
not
what that sort of loony means by the phrase. Later, I read of a French parson who claimed to have been reading his Bible and looked up to see la Bête staring in at him through a window pane. He was terrified; I was not. But, then, la Bête was supposedly a killer, and they have never shown the slightest sign of malign intent.

It places a hand against the window pane. They have only three fingers, long as yardsticks. It held its hand against the glass a short while, and then it moved away. That is the only occasion I have ever seen one of them close-up. Possibly, that one voyeuristic act was enough the settle their curiosity.

The distance from my window to the ground is slightly more than twenty-two feet and six inches.

I find it odd that the island is such a small place, and no one else has ever seen one. Or maybe it’s only that no one else has ever admitted to seeing one. Same as I haven’t.

The second time I saw them, a month later, I was clipping sunflowers for a vase in my modest kitchen. Sunflowers always seem to brighten a room, or a garden, and that’s why I grow them every year. But there I was, on my knees, and I saw them through the grape-covered trellis. They were all the same height, moving very slowly towards the sea. I have wondered if they
come
from the sea, through I have never seen any evidence of them on the beaches. None of them seemed to notice me. They weren’t in view for more than four or five minutes, and then I went back to clipping sunflowers and put the whole event out of my mind. That was three years ago.

Three years and spare change.

“People talk,” Cheshire said, during one of her visits.

“People talk? About me? And what do they say?”

“How you never go out.”

“I do so. I am in my garden almost every day. Sometimes, I walk down to the beach and look for sea glass.

My mother called beach glass “mermaid’s tears.”

“That isn’t what I mean, and you are well aware it isn’t.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and I meant it, though I think I must have sounded a bit huffy from the face she made. Another reason I call her Cheshire is her broad smile and straight teeth, but she wasn’t smiling then. “Whatever they say about me, it certainly doesn’t matter.”

“They know about that girl, when you were still teaching. They talk about that, too. I know it’s no one’s business but your own. Still, I thought you ought to know.”

“Well, now I do, don’t I?”

“If you’d just come out every now and then.”

I made some perfectly legitimate excuse for ending the conversation, at least temporarily. I wasn’t about to ask her to leave, though part of me wanted to do just that. I told her I was baking bread, most likely. A loaf of bread, or cranberry muffins, or a strawberry and rhubarb pie. I must admit that I am inordinately fond of strawberry and rhubarb pies.

“You know, there’s bingo Thursday night at the – ”

“Cheshire, I absolutely must see to the…” Well, whatever I was baking. “It’ll burn, otherwise.”

“Have it your way,” she sighed and sipped her tea.

If they do not come from here, I wonder where it is they
do
come from. And why? Are they like the summer people, vacationing? Is there no sea in their world, presuming they are not native to this planet? Is there something they’re trying to learn by watching us? Or do they have no real interest whatsoever in human beings. I’ll never know, because they never speak. I have no idea if they are capable of speech. If they were, why would they bother talking to an old woman who bakes pies and grows sunflowers and was politely, but firmly, asked to retire early because she had an affair with a student?

They are
inscrutable
.

Yes, that is the word I would use to best describe their intentions. Inscrutable.

Am I inscrutable to them, and is that why they have – excepting that first time – always kept their distance?

I know there are more questions here than answers, but that doesn’t seem inappropriate. Not to me it doesn’t. People are too insistent in their desire for constant answers.

I am writing these words down at the little tea table that belonged to my grandmother, and as my pen moves across the paper, there are five of them striding, stilt-like, towards the bluffs. They are tall, oh so beautifully tall.