Fantastic Metropolis

Drew felt fury rising up in him. But along with that, a vertigo of horror and revulsion, disorienting him. Paralyzing him. His eyes dropped to the spike in the woman’s other hand. One of the spikes that had affixed the crucified being to the wall.

She came forward then, the head under one arm and the spike rising up like a dagger.

Drew raised him arms and cried out, “No!”

The woman lunged past him and fell atop the back of the blind, half-flayed thing as it sought to rise, plunging the spike into the base of its neck.

The three collapsed as one; the woman, the head, the sightless creature. Only the woman rose, but she lifted the head in her arms again. Now it was entirely motionless, as were all of the embryos reverently lined up on the sofa.

“What are you doing?” Drew asked the woman, lowering his arms slowly. “What have you done?”

For a moment, she gazed at him. Her face was nearly blank. And yet, he knew his own face well enough to interpret sadness there. Despair. And self-loathing. He had seen those things often enough in the mirror to recognize them now.

She turned, and moved to the door. Tapped the keys to open it, as she must have seen him do. From the inside, it did not require a code, and the door ground painfully open most of the way. Where was she going, nude, with a human head cradled like an infant? She had no weapon now, yet Drew was still almost afraid to follow. But he did.

“Wait!” he called after her.

As he slipped out through the door, into the mounting rain, he saw the woman standing at the balcony railing, gazing out at the city lights. Maybe searching for the ghosts he had seen.

“Hey,” he said to her, holding out his hands. “Come back inside. Please. I won’t send you away. I promise you.”

She half turned to look back at him, rain water streaming down her face. He saw her lips move slightly, as if she were trying to mold words.

“Please stay with me,” he told her.

The woman turned back to face the night. With a solemn kind of grace, she stepped over the low railing.

“Hey!” Drew said, lunging forward. And he saw the woman leap out into the dark, wet air, his own disembodied head still clutched in her arms.

Drew yelled for her to stop, even as he watched her white form plummet. He fell against the railing, looked down. Saw her pass through the yellow light of a lower window as she fell. Then she passed out of the light, and he lost sight of her altogether. He heard a heavy thump, and it was like he had heard his heart drop severed to the floor of his chest.

He pounded down the stairs, some outside the warehouse, some inside, until he reached the street. It was cold as the surface of an iced lake beneath his bare feet. He welcomed the punishment of the sensation.

He moved to her side, knelt there.

“Oh, God,” he murmured. “Why…why did you do that?”

He moved the wet hair which obscured her face, afraid at what death might have done to alter it, evil sculptor that it was. The drop had not been so great as to disfigure her. With her head turned on its side, she merely appeared asleep. She was beautiful, even in death. A beautiful work of art, bleeding in the gutter.

Tenderly, he shifted the hair at her temple. Though it was too dark to see it, he lightly touched the tiny mole there. A birthmark that united them.

Drew did not leave her in the gutter. Gently, he scooped her slack form into his arms, and began the long climb back up the stairs.

He went to the bed, rested her there. Again, he cleared wet strands of hair from her face.

He had taken the head with him, and now he gathered the embryos, the heavy grotesque corpse of the crucified being. In addition to these, he went into his laboratory of a work shop and collected organic cultures and growths which the woman had missed in the darkness.

He deposited the woman and all the rest of his brood into the tank in which she had been grown. But instead of pumping in the violet amniotic solution, he took down two jugs of chemicals from his metal shelves.

With a mask over his face, he poured the contents of one jug and then the other over the figures in the tank. He quickly stepped back from the billowing fumes. Inside these clouds, the bodies in the tank were indistinct shadows. They appeared to have all become one tangled, deformed being. But the limbs shortened, the shadows began to fade away, leaving only the vapor…which the vent fans sucked out into the night air to be dispersed like the ashes of a pyre.

Watching the last fume tendrils rise to the fan, Drew mourned the woman. He mourned himself.

He felt like a ghost of himself…as though it were he who had committed suicide.

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“The Reflections of Ghosts” is the opening story in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown collection (Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2000).