Periphery, page 7
This couldn’t be right. He took a step closer to the broken finger of concrete poking up from the tangle of weeds a few feet from the sidewalk. His father’s directions had been meticulous, but somewhere Andrew might have taken a wrong turn. This was just an old property marker, a relic from the ’20s or ’30s when a house had stood at the site.
He re-read his notes, tapping the page as he checked off each turn. The intersection one block south. Check. The retention pond off to his right. Check. The apartment complex across the street with its bright yellow security booth and the convenience store one block north. Check and check. Everything matched. This must be the right place. Andrew stared sourly at the marker. All this urgency over a three-foot column of weathered concrete. He had driven from one end of Tampa to the other for this?
“Jesus.”
And yet, something wasn’t right here. A thrumming had begun somewhere near the center of his mind, a deep, cyclical vibration that resonated the same way the voices had.
“You go there,” his father said after watching Andrew scribble the directions. “You’ll see a pillar of stone. It might be hard to find at first because it’ll look like something bland, the base of an old lamppost, a cement planter, a chunk of retaining wall.”
“Which is it?” Behind Andrew, people were blowing their noses, coughing and clearing throats, wiping away tears. The voices had stopped abruptly, seemingly in mid-utterance, as if some critical alignment had slipped out of phase, but those affected were still struggling to recover. Two stalls over, the trio of guards were pulling Dennis to his feet, the lower half of his face masked in a smear of blood that continued to pour from his shattered nose.
“I don’t know. Their real shape is like something sculpted out of bone, an enormous rib poking from the ground. But that’s not how you see them at first. I think those initial impressions are different for everyone. The first one I saw looked like a grave marker. It takes a few encounters before you learn how to push beyond the illusion.”
“Dad,” Andrew sighed.
“Andrew, listen closely. Go there. Touch it. That’s all I’m asking.” The guards led the bloody inmate from the room. “After what just happened here, after the park, after Comanche, I think I deserve the benefit of your doubt.”
Now, Andrew edged closer to the property marker, noticing for the first time the way the drought-withered vegetation diminished as it approached the concrete, growing lower and sparser until it stopped altogether a foot from the base. The earth around it had a baked and powdery appearance, ash white, as if scattered with crematory remains. He glanced around, saw no one, and sank to one knee, wincing as the wounds across his thighs flexed.
Something bland? It was certainly that. If he’d been strolling along this sidewalk he wouldn’t have given the thing a second glance. But wasn’t that what it wanted, not to be seen? Andrew frowned. What had given him that impression? It was inconspicuous, yes, but so were telephone poles. So were mailboxes. So were a thousand other things passed daily without notice.
Still, he could feel his eyes yearning to veer away to the left or right. It was an effort to keep them centered on the pillar. His thoughts wanted to turn away as well, to focus instead on the empty bottles in the kitchenette’s trash (replaceable), or the look on Max’s face after dodging Andrew’s swing, or the pot of water boiling away on the front burner of the stovetop next to a forgotten box of macaroni and cheese. It was as if the marker and his mind were identical magnetic poles. His attention deflected around it, circled back, slipped over and past it once more, following the contours of an invisible bubble of deterrence.
Andrew concentrated harder.
Here was something else: the air around the marker wavered slightly, as if the concrete radiated heat. It was barely visible, but it was real. Its surface was pitted and scarred, the corners eroded, the top third broken off completely. Particles of maroon speckled the gray rock, giving the concrete the appearance of mottled skin, coarse, flaked, and scabbed. As he studied the marker, he thought he noticed subtle motion beneath the lightly wavering air, a slow flexing as the sides of the pillar gradually expanded and contracted.
Andrew made a low sound at the back of his throat, turned his head and spat. His nose was running. He wiped it across a sleeve and rose to his feet, leaning back with both hands pressed against the small of his back until the vertebra of his lower lumbar began to pop. Touch that thing? How was that going to help him protect his family? Protect them from what?
The vetro offalate.
Gibberish. Made-up words like something out of a children’s book. But he had heard them in his thoughts, syllables pushed into his mind and uttered by a lipless mouth that yawned wide and puckered closed with a wet, viscous snap.
A nursery rhyme trilled suddenly through his head, a little four-line verse Anna would sometimes ask him to read, climbing into his lap and flipping through the pages of In Your Own Back Yard until she found the drawing of the big, bright insects:
“Beetle, butterfly, ant and bee,
In my garden, but so hard to see.
I need a clue, where can you be found?
Just open your eyes, we’re all around.”
A week ago, he would have also dismissed quintaloch as babble-speak. Now a new rhyme occurred to him with an effortlessness that seemed to suggest he was remembering a long-forgotten favorite rather than inventing a new one:
Quintaloch, quintaloch hiding in a tree,
Quintaloch, quintaloch coming after me.
I’ll close my eyes and sit real still
and hope it passes by.
“Don’t fool yourself,” said the quintaloch,
“We both know you will die.”
Andrew reached out and grasped the marker. In the instant before his arm went numb to the elbow he felt the concrete yield under his fingers, a muscular and reflexive pliability, rigid yet supple, like touching a bladder taut with fluid. Revulsion closed his throat, but before he could yank his hand away crimson light flared around him, blinding and hot. His weight doubled as if an invisible, leaden cloak had crashed down across his shoulders. It pressed him lower, compressed his spine, tugged at his arms. He lifted a heavy head to behold distant black mountains silhouetted in an enormous red sun and opened his mouth to scream. Sulfurous air rushed in, coating his tongue, clawing his throat while a booming moan so deep and resonant it was nearly subsonic erupted nearby. A huge and confounding shadow fell over him. It stretched across the hardpan plain toward the distant foothills, a writhing mass of protrusions furling and unfurling in a lunatic frenzy.
Under the swollen, bleeding sun, Andrew thought: This is how…
Under the familiar yellow sun: … I die.
He spun, took a single, lurching step, and smashed into a plaid chest. His legs crumpled. Hands were on his shoulders, pushing him away while holding him up. He hung limply in the man’s grip like a garment pinned to a clothesline, and blinked up into a smiling, bearded face.
“It’s okay,” Little Billy assured him. “I know exactly how you feel.”
Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the shade of a coffeehouse veranda. Had it been any farther than two blocks, Andrew doubted he would have made it, but Little Billy kept him on his feet long enough to stumble here and sink into a chair. The vividness of the vision was fading, but the smell remained. Andrew could still detect a faint, acrid odor with every inhalation, a baked pungency, vaguely sweet, that gave the hot, still, afternoon an unsettled quality, as if everything, the trees, the fence posts, the hedges, wavered on the verge of combustion.
“Used to be, you could touch a xalanthracoil and all you’d get is a mild yuck, like sitting on a public toilet seat still warm from the last guy. Now.” Little Billy extended his hand palm out, eased it forward, then yanked it back and shook it vigorously.
“Xalanthracoil?”
“Your dad’s name for them. I wanted to call them initiators, but he said that was too prosaic.” Little Billy repeated the word again silently, as if gauging the feel of it on his lips. “Claimed there was a Greek or Latin reason for the name, but he never bothered to explain it.”
“How do you two know each other?” Andrew stared into the other man’s face, struck, as he had been the day before, by the familiarity of his features.
“We go way back.”
Andrew held his gaze for a moment before dropping his eyes to the glass of iced tea sweating on the wrought iron table between them. The awning provided only a thin band of shade, but it was enough to knock the early afternoon heat back a notch or two. For some reason, the thought of sitting inside the coffeehouse’s over-cooled interior made him uneasy. “You obviously know a hell of a lot more about these things than I do. My father and I haven’t talked much over the years. And never about his… research.
“So, here’s the deal.” The abrupt irritation in the other man’s voice pulled Andrew’s eyes back to his face. “I can see this playing out two ways. Me sitting here all afternoon trying to convince you you’re not crazy, and me just getting up and telling you to follow if you want to learn what the hell is going on. How about we agree to not waste each other’s time and get on with this?”
Andrew said nothing.
“Look,” Little Billy said in a more conciliatory tone. “I’ve been on the streets a long time. I’m not used to talking to people the way I once did. You tend to be more direct when you’re trying to convince some douchebag not to stick you and steal your coat. So I’m sorry if I seem,” his gaze rose, as if searching for the right word in the air above their heads, “abrupt? Abrupt.
"I understand how overwhelming this shit is. You think I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m going to start believing in hidden monsters lurking around every corner?’ You think your dad did? All we set out to do was count the local squirrel population. Squirrels, for Christ’s sake.”
Andrew snapped his fingers. Some mental flutter had erased the beard, shortened the sun-bleached hair, smoothed away the crows’ feet and tightened the features to that of a man years younger, and with an ‘oomph’ of recognition, he realized why Little Billy looked so familiar.
“William Phipps. Of course. My dad told me your name but it didn’t register until this instant. You’re that William Phipps.”
The man across the table raised his arms with a theatric flourish. “One and only.”
“Christ, almighty.” Andrew glanced around and saw they were alone. Still, he lowered his voice to something barely more than a whisper. “I know it’s been a long time, and I know the charges were eventually dismissed, but you’re taking a risk coming back. If someone recognized you.”
Little Billy snorted, threw an arm over the back of his chair and pulled his mug of coffee clattering across the table. “What? They’d run me down in the street? Beat me to death with the first club they could find?” He took a sip, made a face and tossed the rest of his coffee into the planter at his side. “I’ve spent the last twenty years dodging things that would make a cage fighter piss himself. You think I’m worried about being harassed by someone who remembers me from all those years ago? Besides, there’s not many who would recognize me. Not anymore.”
In the silence that followed Andrew mulled a number of questions, rejecting each as either too big, too personal, or too absurd. Did you do it? Did you kill them all? Or did something jump out of the bushes and tear them to shreds? He sighed and asked the only question that didn’t feel like an invasion: “So why did you come back?”
“Your dad asked me to. Time’s almost up.” He stood and slung his knapsack over a shoulder. “John and I had to learn things the hard way. Some of it was brutal. You, on the other hand, have the great good fortune of getting me as a teacher.”
“Where are we going?”
Little Billy made for the exit and Andrew followed. The afternoon smelled of parched vegetation and the first whiffs of some coming conflagration, a firestorm that Andrew was beginning to suspect would reduce his world to ash and cinder.
“On a little field trip. Consider this the first day of class. I suggest you take notes.”
The answering machine picked up yet again and this time Andrew left a message, something casual and unconcerned and painfully forced. Just touching base. There’s a sale on school backpacks. Did Anna need a new one this year? Let me know and I’ll pick one up. Talk to you soon.
What he needed was reassurance his family remained alive and well. After yesterday, Grace believed Anna’s safety depended on keeping her father as far from her as possible. After today, Andrew feared she might be right.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned what he hoped was a blank face to Little Billy. Or did he prefer William? He was following his father’s assistant(?), partner(?), acolyte(?), across a parking lot four blocks southeast of the xalanthracoil Andrew had touched.
“Thank you for yesterday,” Andrew said. “I should have said that earlier. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if you hadn’t shown up.”
“Just glad you and your little girl made it out of the park alright.” Little Billy glanced over his shoulder. “You were both alright?”
Andrew seesawed his hand in the air. “Anna was fine. Me, not so much. Ended up plowing through a hedge and cracking my head on the pavement.”
“I’ve never seen squim act that way before, moving as a pack. Your dad was right to be worried. It was as if they were being directed.”
“Squim? That what you call them, squim? Not very Greek-sounding.” They crossed into an alley bordered by a tall backyard fence on one side and a row of scrub pines on the other. There was trash under the pines, beer bottles and Coke cans and candy wrappers and Andrew wondered briefly if this shaded ribbon of shelter, padded in a bed of fallen needles, was someplace Little Billy hunkered when he wasn’t doing his father’s bidding.
“That one was mine. We’ve named everything we’ve found. Dozen species so far. Who knows how many more out there waiting to be discovered.”
“Jesus. It’s like an entire ecosystem hidden right under our noses.”
“We use the term shadow biosphere. Collectively, they’re called the bilantu offalate.”
Andrew flipped open the small notebook Little Billy had given him upon their arrival at the parking lot. “This lesson number one?”
“Why not?”
Andrew kept his eyes on their shadows stretching ahead of them. Things were flittering in his periphery, but he did not turn. Keep talking, he told himself. Focus on Little Billy’s voice. Don’t let them know you know they’re there.
“Bilantu offalate. Not the vetro offalate?” Andrew noted with a small mental cringe the words no longer sounded made up.
“They’re two different things. The bilantu are lesser creatures. Think of them as vermin stranded here after the vetro retreated back to their universe.”
“You mean like the rats and cats left in the New World after the Conquistadors went home?”
“Sure. They’re mindless for the most part, all instinct and appetite. The vetro on the other hand…”
“Okay,” Andrew stopped him with an arm against his chest. “Before we launch into some sort of sensei/grasshopper thing here, I need you to answer one question.”
Little Billy smiled. “Just one?”
“My father told me if I wanted to protect my family I needed to touch that thing. So, I have. I’ve touched it. Now you tell me, how am I better prepared to defend my wife and daughter against whatever is coming?”
“Touching the coil has changed you up here,” Little Billy pointed to Andrew’s temple. “Not a lot. Not yet. But it’s a changed that needed to start today. Look,” he gripped Andrew’s shoulder and squeezed. “Getting you caught up with all of this, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. Before I say anything else, let me show you what I dragged you out here to see. It’ll help you understand.”
Andrew thought of Anna and Grace running from something in the backyard, barricading themselves in the bathroom, the scratch of teeth or talons across a door too flimsy to hold back the terrible things determined to get inside.
He lifted an arm as an invitation for Little Billy to proceed, and together they walked down the alley past a dumpster (don’t turn, don’t look, not every trash bin has a quintaloch curled around it), past the back wall of a Laundromat, to the edge of a shallow slope that bottomed out in a dry drainage canal. A line of kudzu-entangled trees ran along the other embankment, screening the pair from the street. The withered vines hung in brown nets from the branches, giving the foliage the appearance of old women hunched under tattered shawls. After glancing behind them, Little Billy made his way down.
“It took your father four years to identify every xalanthracoil. As you’ve probably already noticed, they don’t want to be found.”
“How many of these coil-things are there?”
“Eighteen. They form a perfect circle 1.8 miles across.”
“Like a big Stonehenge?”
Little Billy mopped his face with a cloth pulled from his back pocket. “They were intentionally positioned, but they’re not a calendar.”
“What then?”
“They open doorways. Show me where this one is.”
“A coil? There’s one here?” The culvert was a dumping ground, littered with discarded furniture, car parts, electronics, items that couldn’t be shoved into a garbage can and dragged to the corner. A battered dresser lay overturned to his right, one drawer extended in surrender. A mattress. A television. A bicycle frame. There was even a pot-bellied stove buried in the sandy soil up to its cast-iron door. Rotted bedding. Discarded toys. Broken lamps and legless chairs. And shining hotly between it all, the glint of broken glass.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.” Andrew took a tentative step toward the dresser. A faded and bubbled Spider-Man sticker appeared to be the only thing holding it together. “I’m not going to go rooting through all this shit.”
