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“Thank you, William.” He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you.”
The rain came, mixed with hailstones that stung like bees. He went back to the big house and I went back to the small one. Hail rattled on the windows. The wind. I dreamed that night of a hollow moon filled with demons eating each other alive. Eating themselves alive like the worm ouroboros. I could see the red house below the hollow moon. The green door.
We saw two more before the end came. The sixth, a woman named Annette Crosby, screamed herself awake. When she calmed down she said she dreamed of the red house and opening the green door and then remembered nothing except for darkness and wind and a foul odor and a bodiless voice that spoke a word that sounded like tantullah or tamtusha. It filled her with horror. She said she would not dream of that house again for another eight hundred dollars. Or eight thousand. But she took Elgin’s check. Why not? She earned it.
Then came Burt Devereaux, a teacher of mathematics at Saint Dominic Academy in Lewiston. He filled in the form and before signing asked Elgin several questions, more than the others had, about the “light hypnotic” he would have to take. Elgin answered these questions to Devereaux’s satisfaction. He signed the form, took his place on the couch, and quaffed the beaker of clear liquid. I took my seat before the oneway glass with my pad on my knee. Elgin sat behind the desk and started the music. In the testing room Mr. Devereaux was studying the picture of the red house with the green door. Eventually his eyes began to slip closed and the picture began to sag in his hand. It was like every one of our other test runs until it wasn’t.
I was in my chair. Elgin was in his place beside me. Ten minutes passed. Eyes closed, Devereaux reached for the pad and the pen resting on the upturned page, then dropped his hand. It began to clench and unclench. The other hand rose up, hesitated, then moved swiftly. I wrote in plain 3:29 PM, Dev raises right hand & makes a fist & hits self in cheek.
“He’s trying to wake himself up,” I said.
Devereaux began to shiver all over like a man suffering a fit of ague. His legs jittered and scissored. His back arched. His midsection rose from the couch and thumped down and rose again. His feet tapdanced and he began to make a sound, mump-mump-mump, as if his lips were spitstuck and he was trying to get them open to articulate.
“We need to wake him up.”
“Wait.”
“Jesus, Elgin.”
“Wait.”
The Polaroids flashed. Their cunning inbred motors whirred. Pictures fluttered to the floor in our part and his part, already starting to develop. His eyelids began to bulge until the eyes beneath must have swelled almost to the size of golfballs as if from an infusion of hydrostatic fluid. The lids didn’t open naturally but split apart. Devereaux’s eyes had been gray. The eyes which continued to protrude from their sockets were dead black. They grew like tumors out of his face. Elgin’s hand was clamped on my shoulder but I barely felt it. Neither of us asked what was happening, not because we couldn’t believe it but because we could. We might as well have been witnessing a locomotive emerging from a fireplace. Devereaux screamed and his eyeballs split and fine tendrils wavered up like dandelion filaments only black. There was no breeze to blow them, but they bent toward the oneway glass, as if sensing us.
“Oh my God.” Elgin.
The Polaroids flashed. The black tendrils separated from the black orbs that had given them birth and drifted toward us, at first in a small cloud but beginning to melt and disappear as they came.
“I need them!” Elgin shouted. “I need them! Proof! Proof!”
He started for the door. I grabbed him and held him back. He struggled but I was stronger. I wasn’t going to let him go in there, not because I cared for him enough to save him from himself but because I didn’t want him to open that door and let any of them out.
The split black eyeballs began to retract toward Devereaux’s face like a film run in reverse. He said mump-mump-mump. The crotch of his pants darkened as his bladder let go. The split black eyeballs healed themselves, first there was a seam and then that was gone and they were smooth again, only bulging from his face in small knobs like those you sometimes see on an old tree. Then they pulled back in and his eyes closed and Devereaux gave a galvanic twist at the waist and fell on the floor. Elgin’s white shirt ripped as he tore free of my grasp. He was out the door and around the partition and in the other half. He knelt and got his arms around Devereaux’s shoulders.
“Help me, William! Help me!”
If Devereaux was dead, this would be partly on me and even in my shock I knew it. Saying I was a witness rather than an accomplice wouldn’t fly. So I went around the partition and into the test room and asked Elgin if he was breathing.
He leaned forward, then winced back. “Yes, but his breath is foul.”
It wasn’t only his breath that was foul. His sphincter had let go. I looked around. Not all the black tendrils were gone. Some of whatever Devereaux had brought back from the red house when he picked up the living room floor, perhaps flying up at him from the darkness and infecting him with one indrawn breath, was still floating in the far corner of the room under one of the speakers. I watched them. If they moved toward us I intended to flee and let the Gentleman Scientist fend for himself. This was his experiment, after all. Yet even then in those endless moments I thought of far stars beyond the reach of any telescope and the fuming interiors of a hundred thousand grains of sand and knew it was also my experiment. I hadn’t left. I could have but I hadn’t. I had felt the returning tingle of something approximating a normal human being, whatever that is and assuming there is such a thing. Like a limb that has been slept on and fallen asleep and begins to awake. On the hook, we used to say in the boondocks. Or FIDO. Fuck it, drive on.
“We need to get him out of here.” I pointed to the black tendrils. They were stirring lightly, restlessly. I think they were watching us.
“I need a sample.”
“You need to think about how you would look in a jail suit. Help me.”
We lifted him, Elgin taking his ankles and me taking the rest of him. We got him out the door and across the hall and into the living room. We laid him on the floor with drool running from both sides of his mouth. I went back and shut the double doors to the former dining room, shutting in those black things from the other place, the place under the floor, unless they could waft under the doorjamb and in with us. I hoped the rest of them would just disappear. If Elgin wanted to fuck with them, that was on him. I was done.
But first there was the matter of Devereaux. I told Elgin to help me sit him up so what was left of him wouldn’t choke. We lifted his top half, Elgin on one side, me on the other, our hands meeting and clasping behind Devereaux’s back. Blackish-red tears ran from the corners of his eyes. Blood and something else. I didn’t want to know what the something else was. I slapped his cheek and bent to the ear on my side and told him to wake up, snap out of it, afraid of what his eyes would look like if he did.
His eyes opened. They were bloodshot and gray as they had been but empty of understanding. Elgin snapped his fingers in front of his face and nothing changed. I darted my fingers at his eyes and nothing changed. He was a breathing mansized doll.
“Oh my God, will he come back?”
“I don’t know. Will he? You’re the scientist.”
Elgin raised one of Devereaux’s hands. It only hung there until he put it down again.
