Mr. Maphead
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“What do you want?” older Gregory asked in a grating parody of his own voice and, as Gregory/Glowacz hesitated, he pulled a large pistol from his pocket and held it cocked to his own temple, his finger on the trigger. “I’ll count to three,” he said calmly. “One, two—”
“Nothing.” The voice that came out of his mouth was neither his nor Glowacz’s, but a reedy, dissonant hybrid of both.
His older self nodded, lowered his weapon and stuck it back in his pocket, then turned and disappeared into the glutinous gray stuff that seemed to swirl ever more thickly around them. The harsh voice called faintly out of the gloom: “Better keep moving. The air solidifies around anything stationary.”
By now there was no possibility of finding a direction. The gray miasma was all, everywhere. Gregory waited for some signal from Glowacz’s hand, then, when none came, he began to pantomime walking, and although there was nothing solid under his feet, he had a feeling of accelerating motion. For all he knew, he might be hurtling toward something hard enough to smash him into pulp, but without reference points to convey to his brain the terror of imminent death, he felt only apprehension and dismay at his own helplessness.
Then he thought of something so obvious that he was angry at himself for not realizing it sooner: this wasn’t some “unknown place,” as Glowacz had promised to show him, using ‘dream divination.’ This was a dream; granted, a lucid dream, in which he felt entirely awake, if still a world fashioned by his brain. Maybe that was why this place was devoid of odors, because one has no actual sense of smell or taste in dreams. And isn’t the illusion of wakefulness sometimes present in ordinary dreams?
Either the purple spider was just a prop in an elaborate con, and the drug that had induced this bizarre state was contained in the shot Glowacz had administered to both of them, or the spider’s venom really did possess some anomalous property that earned the Asabikeshiinh its reputation as a ‘dream catcher.’ But was he merely a spectator of a neural process over which he had no control, or could he consciously alter the course of this dream, even change the scenario altogether? He could only try.
As soon he thought the word “try,” the sense of movement ceased. He felt the Glowacz hand frantically clenching and unclenching, but didn’t understand what it meant. The gluey grayness began to coalesce around him, more and more thickly, and yet above him it seemed as if the gray was thinning, beginning to reveal something like sky behind it, cloudless and as white as a piece of paper. Having slowly tightened around his body like soft rope, the swirl, as his older self had warned, quickly hardened, and he found himself trapped.
He tried to imagine himself flying across a blue sky, but nothing happened. The more distant gray stuff had begun to thin out, if not disappear, since cords of it as thick as heavy ropes were strung everywhere, crossing and connecting into a complex pattern. Behind everything was the pure whiteness.
He was tightly wrapped, now, his hands pinioned to his sides. The gray was all but gone, and he saw that he was suspended in a cocoon-like sac inside a vast network of gray-white strands stretching off into the farthest distance. He saw other human heads protruding from similar sacs strung above, below and on either side of him. Some looked bewildered, others terrified, and as he strained his neck to get a better look at their faces, he was shocked to recognize people he’d known at various times in his life.
A few feet away was a whimpering boy he’d grown up with, Matt Silbers, who had died of leukemia when he was fifteen. Mrs. Crisfield, his high school English teacher, who’d praised his term papers and encouraged him to go into academics, hung just below him, making low, singsong noises while moving her head aimlessly back and forth.
And, good God, there was Amy. Amy, who had once loved him. Her first love, his... whatever it was. They’d even talked of marriage, before the panic of being trapped in a relationship took hold of him and he had fled to Europe for an extended tour. Her letters were full of hurt and bewilderment over his disappearance, until they stopped. Although he’d eventually scraped together the courage to write her back, he never saw or heard from her again.
She became aware of him staring at her, and her head slowly turned. She looked exactly the same as she had at eighteen, and prettier than he remembered, her wary innocence not yet debased by vanity. Yes, this had to be a drug-induced dream. She couldn’t age past his last memory of her. She didn’t smile or curse or say a word. She just looked at him.
“I’m sorry.” His voice, though strangely muted, was his own. Maybe Glowacz wasn’t part of him any longer. He couldn’t see his hands, so there was no way of knowing. How would he get back now?
Then the massive structure of ropes began to vibrate, and he vibrated with it. The heads of all the trapped people looked upward as one, and they began a piteous, collective wailing. He, too, looked up, and his mouth sagged open. From a great distance he saw something descending rapidly along the gray ropes, through what Gregory only now realized was a titanic web.
With a kind of ecstatic horror he saw that it was the Asabikeshiinh but — seen from the perspective of something the size of a fruit fly — immense, monstrous, its iridescent purple body almost blinding. As it neared his tiny, helpless form from above, its agitated pedipalps betrayed its eagerness to feed.
This had to be part of his dream, his lifelong fear of large spiders looming to exaggerated proportions in his sleeping mind. And to complete the absurdity of dreams, the spider had a man’s face, and the man was himself, the same bitter, hopeless, suicidal older self that he’d just encountered minutes? hours? ago. But one always accepts the outrageous events in dreams, unless the dream becomes a nightmare, as this one had, and in any event he was too paralyzed with fear even to join the wailing chorus.
The Asabikeshiinh stopped, hanging hugely just above him, and then its gigantic human face opened its twisted mouth full of ill-kept teeth and spoke to him. “Just giving you and all your little memory companions what you asked for,” it said in a sneering rasp of thunder. “Nothing.”
The face raised its sagging, stubbly chin, and from its truncated throat jutted shiny black fangs long and sharp enough, from Gregory’s awed perspective, to skewer him like a fly on a mounting pin. Bright yellow venom oozed from the tip of one fang, gathered into a fat, quivering drop bigger than he was, then fell and splashed over him — atrocious, burning, unclean.
How strange that he could watch the fangs preparing to close on his tiny body and both marvel at his brain’s ability to embody one of his oldest fears in such staggering detail and at the same time hear his own panicked screams erupting out of him as he futilely struggled.
There was a sudden flash of silver behind the spider, then a pair of massive, padded forceps enveloped and closed around the spider’s middle, and the hateful, struggling thing was hauled up and out of the web, even out of the white sky beyond.
He had pissed himself, he realized, and at that he began to cry, actually cry, both at this deus ex machina deliverance from the nothingness he deserved, and in a paroxysm of self-pity and shame. He looked around, and was unsurprised to find that he was alone. Alone as he had always been.
He’d been telling himself the same lie for thirty years: that his choice to keep a certain emotional distance from women was both brave and moral, originating from an inner certainty that marriage and fatherhood were simply out of the question for someone like him and would be a disservice to anyone who had the misfortune of loving him. But he knew now as never before that his callous desertion of Amy and all the other women who had mistaken his infatuations for love had been based on nothing more than rich-guy selfishness.
Yet neither his tears nor the spider’s venom melted the webbing holding him in place. He called Glowacz’s name over and over, until his voice faded to a hoarse whisper. There was no day or night here, just the same pale, eternal sky, as if lit by fluorescence. He let his head fall forward on his chest and resigned himself to whatever awaited him. At some point he fell asleep.
After what seemed like years of waking and sleeping in his befouled prison, he lifted his head and found himself alone in Glowacz’s back room. In a weak voice he called his name, but no one answered. The stretched parchment was still on the table, and leaning forward, he could make out an apparent chaos of unrecognizable letters, pictographs, and mathematical symbols, the lines jumbled and overlapping. Staring at it made him dizzy, and he looked away. Though not feeling at all well, Gregory wanted out of here, and tried to stand, but found that he was too weak.
Then he saw a note on the table, next to the now-covered bell jar. “Mr. Anselm,” it read. “the effects of the venom will take some time to wear off. Until then, please rest. You may fall asleep again. I may, too. If you regain your legs before I do, or if I’m gone when you wake up, please let yourself out. As for our bizarrely shared experience, I’ll let you decide if the journey was worth the fare. You’ll recall that I warned you of the risks, and you accepted them. Isaac Glowacz.”
Gregory slept. When he awoke, it was after seven p.m., and there was still no one about. He rose, a bit unsteadily but mostly recovered, then made his careful way downstairs and toward the subway, the abject terrors and bitter revelations of the dream not fading away as they usually did, but crowding thickly on him, leaving him shaken and appalled, and for the first time in years, most unhappily alone.
His bitten finger throbbed unceasingly, his eyes smarted and his skin felt strangely raw and sticky, and several times he noticed furtive stares in his direction from passing pedestrians, but it was only after he stopped before a full-length mirror mounted in front of a discount clothing store that he understood why: his hair, face, neck and the upper half of his shirt were stained with what looked like yellow dye. His red eyes widened in the mirror, and he began to shudder as he realized what it was.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
