Delta Green: Failed anatomies incluye:
- Introduction (Tynes)
- The Alien Thoughts, Part 1 (Laws)
- Intelligences
- The File
- Night and Water
- Dead, Death, Dying
- Punching
- The Secrets No One Knows
- Coming Home
- The Thing in the Stairwell
- Drowning in Sand
- Contingencies
- Philosophy
- Witch Hunt
- After Math
- The Alien Thoughts, Part 2 (Laws)
"Intelligences": mostrar
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Albert Syme is an odd sort who keeps to himself. Floppy and dire, he looks like a clerk, and that’s what he is; one of the thousands that haunt the lunch carts on Washington Avenue at noon. Syme’s glasses hang on the end of his nose like a man poised at the edge of a cliff. His eyes look at you precisely like those of a gecko sunning itself. They are blank and green and flat, and he stares for too long. People don’t look at him. It’s not because he’s imposing. He’s precisely the opposite, small and long-armed and bulging in the middle. It’s not because he seems dangerous. He looks somewhat simple, slick like he was dolloped in a thin grease, and empty in the face.
The reason people don’t look at him is that he’s forgettable.
At this moment, Albert Syme is as close to normal as he ever will be.
Syme works for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Precisely four people know this, and only his boss and the one other person in his office know his name. The two ladies who sit in the Navy desk opposite the ONI collation room know he’s there but don’t know who he is. He supposes the bank might know—his pay draft being supplied by the Office of the Navy, after all. He says nothing to anyone else. His barber. His landlady. To them, he is a receipt. He has no family (they gave him up in Boston) and no friends.
Such things worry Syme. Sometimes, at work, he plays a game where he draws lines, like pipes, from name to name in his mind, connecting all who might know the secret. It doesn’t really matter, he supposes, but he still worries. He imagines his name filling with water, sees the liquid moving in the dark of the pipes, drowning the names of those connected to him. He pictures the people in their tubes, drowning as the water rushes in, in the dark.
He smiles when he thinks these things. His secret, his job, is the most important thing in his life.
The job is his life, though he couldn’t tell you why.
Now, July 19, 1928, he eats a hot dog in the summer sun, grasping it in one ink-stained hand while holding his hat down to keep it from catching the breeze and tumbling up the walk. He is surrounded by hundreds of people who fail to see him, lost in their own lunches, conversations, lives. He eats with the conviction and blankness of an animal. He does this every day when the weather is fine.
When he finishes, he crumples up the hot dog’s wax paper wrapper and drops it to the cement. He glances at the ink on his hand and heads back up the steps of the huge, stone building, crossing from the light of the sun into the shadow of the portico. As he crosses from outside to in, the wind catches his hat but he snatches it from the air before it can get away.
He goes inside and continues the last day of his daily routine.
∆
If Syme had left ten minutes later, he would have seen the officers arrive. Three men in Navy dress, one a captain with a valise handcuffed to his arm. In this building that is not unusual, but this man was special. His name tag read JOHNSON. Syme would have recognized him from the photo on the wall next to the hot pot. He stares at it every day. The two men with the captain were built in the exact way Syme is not. They were human walls with legs, wearing truncheons and pistols on their hips. They did not smile or speak.
These men entered the ONI collation room and the captain spoke with Syme’s supervisor, Templeton Mears, a man who always looks as if he had just survived some near disaster. Mears listened to the description of the job the captain had in mind, and before he could finish Mears swung a hand towards Syme’s desk. Mears barely contained the black terror he felt speaking to the Director of Naval Intelligence. As they spoke, it looked as if Mears’ eyes would continue to grow until they engulfed his whole face.
When the captain was done, the valise was opened and papers were removed, as well as two manilla envelopes which stank of photographic chemicals. They were placed squarely in the center of Syme’s desk. Mears signed a paper for them, and the men left. Immediately Mears fell into his wood chair, which squeaked under his weight. He covered his eyes with his hands.
The room fell back into the drone of the electric clock ticking time.
If he had been there, Syme would have seen all of this. Instead, he was outside, eating his hot dog.
∆
Syme does not like his boss. Mr. Mears is a slack man. He fails to do what is required by the job. He slinks in and out at odd hours. He piles work on Syme’s desk. He reads funny books and sports annuals and flips through the encyclopedias which line the wood-grained walls, leaving Syme and the other man in the office, Norman, to finish the collation. Norman is not efficient, but cares about his work. Syme does not hate Norman. Instead, he feels about Norman the way he feels about the people who ride the #13 bus with him on the way to work. They are there the reason he is there, and as long as they don’t bother him, he will not bother them.
What they do in the room, besides being secret, is boring. They pull Navy files, type and collate copies, staple photographs, cross-check ID numbers and collect them for closed envelope reports. They hand-duplicate files, sometimes many times over. These reports are numbered and are picked up once a week by an armed Navy officer. Where they go from there, no one in the room has any idea. For Norman it is a source of endless speculation. For Mears it is a unconsidered question. For Syme it is an indication that what they do here, in the ONI Collation Office, room 3118, is important.
Syme enters and finds Mears’ desk empty. Norman sits at his smaller, steel desk, hunched over it, his jacket off, sweat on his thick brow and in his thinning brown hair. Norman leans over a sheet of graphing paper and draws a careful line on it with a mechanical pencil. He does this with his tongue pinched between his yellow teeth. Norman often has to hand-draw maps. It is something Syme does not have an eye for.
“What is this document?” Syme asks the room, his back to Norman’s back.
Norman’s pencil stops on the sheet and he turns. His face is round and red and Irish. His mouth hangs open. His empty blue eyes stare at Syme’s back without any recognition of the fact that Syme was speaking to him.
Syme hefts the folders and holds them up without turning around.
“Some big wheel brought that down from the Chief of Naval Operations. I wasn’t here. Just Mears. Mears told me.”
“Where is Mears?”
Norman laughs, repeats the question in a whisper as if it were a joke, and goes back to work.
Syme removes his jacket, catching a whiff of his body odor in the process, folds the coat and drops it over the edge of his chair. He sits, pulls in his chair, carefully arranges his tools on the table—his typewriter, his India ink, his fountain pen, his mechanical pencil, stapler, eraser, ink eraser, paperclips and onionskins.
When this is done, he opens the photographic envelopes first. This has become a habit for him. He likes to guess what the report might be by looking at the photos. Photographs of wreckage usually mean foreign technology intelligence; bodies usually mean accidents; grainy photos are often spy shots of foreign fleets; photos of people usually mean suspected spies. There will be the original and for each original a copy.
Today when he looks at the first image, he has no idea what the report might contain.
The photograph is of an eye in extreme close-up. It is huge, bulbous and black, hanging on the skin of some creature, skin which looks like it is flaking off in diamond-shaped chunks. A human hand is barely visible in the upper right corner, out of focus, holding a wooden ruler with large hash-marks. The ruler indicates the eye is three and a quarter inches across. Even though the whole creature is not visible, Syme can see it is dead. He is not precisely sure why he knows this.
Something pulled from the ocean by some Navy destroyer?
Syme blinks, staring at the photo, and adjusts his glasses as if that might somehow help.
Finally, in an attempt to jumpstart his work, he unshuffles the stack of photos and papers in a fan on his desk, like a deck of cards.
He sits still for a long time.
Then he reads.
∆
Syme was born with a cleft palate. The man who left him at the Park Green hospital in Boston said that was why he did so, but Syme does not know this or the man. He was left one evening in June, which has since become his birthday, by a man in sailor’s garb whose hands were covered in blood as if he had delivered the child himself.
He was marked as UBB CPl in the registry, Unknown Baby Boy, Cleft Palate. He was assigned a number and held there in the children’s ward, separated from the other children as if his face might infect them, in an area jokingly called Bastard Hall.
He was taken by the Catholic Charities precisely because of his cleft palate. He was moved to a house that had an assortment of children the world had disfigured, either by the hand of man or by genetics. Syme was was two months old when he arrived.
Today, his face is seamless.
He knows some of this, but not much. He has not had the continuity of a family narrative to tell him this. Instead he has inferred it from a strange ridge on the inside of his mouth, and from what the charity house people told him. Sister Rosita had called him a very lucky little boy, and even then, even at five, Syme had realized she didn’t just mean because of his adoption. His life after the orphanage was a life where he was held at arm’s length. Provided for. Smiled at. Sent to school. But when he left the house of the people the government called his parents, he never went back. It was the life before the adoption that kept his mind rapt.
In the back of Syme’s mind he can still recall struggling to speak, moving his tongue around the gap in the front of his face, and the whistling noise it would sometimes make when he breathed. To him, this feeling is so old—his face seems fine now—that it is like considering a long forgotten wound.
Until he was two, his face had a hole in it with a spray of ill-formed teeth that cut from his upper lip to the base of his nose. He doesn’t really know this. He has no photographs. But every year Syme seemed to change. The wards noticed first that his nose seemed to straighten and flatten from what had been the shape of a split mushroom. A thick webbing of scar tissue filled the gap near the front of his mouth, which, over time, closed like a slow-healing wound. Finally his lip knit itself up like a zipper closing. This process took two years. It was so slow that the few who saw him often enough to notice were never certain what was happening, but it disturbed some of them.
Only Sister Rosita knew him from when he came to the charity house to when he left, and she called Syme a miracle. If Syme was asked to describe his life in one word, “miracle” would not be in the running.
∆
It is just after seven in the evening when Syme looks up again. Outside, he can see the electric lights from Grant Park through the large, curved window, which otherwise throws back a reflection of the entire room over the black of night. His head is buzzing like the clock.
Norman must have crept off some time before, saying nothing, shutting the door quietly to avoid interacting with Syme. In his typical manner, Mears had never returned. The building feels vast and empty, but Syme is used to being here at odd hours.
When it is empty, the building feels like a church.
Syme has finished reading the file he was to copy, and is having a hard time finding a point in the narrative to grab hold of and fold into a suitable shape to fit in his mind. It is not just the photos, which on their own are extremely disturbing. It is not the fact that the Federal government has seized the populace of an entire New England town in secret and interred them. It is not the fact that the report includes after-action statements from submarine commanders indicating torpedoes were fired. It is not even the agglomeration of these facts. It is what is left out of the report.
The holes in the report say things. They say that man is not the only intelligent resident of this world. They say that people can breed with inhuman . . . things . . . and that cities of their kind dot the bottom of oceans all over the world. They say the Navy has discovered an enemy which lives in the sea, and which had until now gone undiscovered. The report screams this without ever saying it outright.
A Marine battalion, heavy weapons, full combat, torpedoes—as always, the Navy is deadly serious. It is only when this narrative is inserted into the photos that the story takes off on its own, a looping film of black and white in Syme’s mind.
His mind moves through pages and ties them up with photographs. In his mind’s eye, the photos enter the lines of text and vice versa, and when they are inextricably linked up they spin and spin, refusing to leave his brain.
Two photographs in particular occupy his thoughts for some time.
One is of what might have once been a woman. Her face is fixed in the wax-like repose of death. Her neck is bloated and crisscrossed by mottled veins and scars. Her white hair is thinned to the point where her peeling scalp shines in the light of the flashbulb. Her eyes are huge and watery and turned at different angles. Her shirt, which looks like something from a Victorian play, is punctured by holes and where her torso is punched open, a thin liquid has poured out, something other than blood. Even that is not so bad. Above the waist she is hideous, dead but not inhuman. Below the waist, the body explodes into madness.
Her hips begin normally and then split into five limbs. The skirt which once covered the nightmare is rolled up and folded back. The limbs are mottled and scaly and fraught with dewclaws and teeth and strange webbing. They all end the same, in a dumb flipper the size of a forearm. No toes, nothing resembling a foot. Just gray-white flippers.
The second photograph is of two of these things. Living. Standing behind barbed wire fencing, lit by headlight or klieg. They stand upright. Both are male. One a child. The big one is an older man with a white beard, a pea coat and an odd, antiquated cap. Outside the wire in the background, the silhouettes of two Marines overlook the scene.
Both captives have strange, bulging throats, short legs, long arms and wide, reflective, shining eyes, watery eyes that are pools of light, staring into the camera. The man has his teeth bared, and they are tiny fish teeth, small, angled and perfect. The man hugs the boy protectively.
Syme does not know why he focuses on these photographs.
∆
Syme almost died of a fever in the spring of 1925. The problem began with insomnia. He found, quite suddenly, he could no longer sleep through the night. Where he had once retired to bed and woken (without alarm) at the proper time, he found himself full of terrible energy. Lying in bed, even sitting still at night, felt wrong. Instead, it seemed that he should walk, run, dance, scream. The energy, which grew as the sun fell, was at first strangely exhilarating and later frightening, like too much current put through a circuit which began to heat and then melt.
He had not yet started at the Navy. He worked as a clerk at the Regis library. There he began what would later become his dull lifestyle, something which no doubt had aided him in securing a job at the Office of the Navy. He spoke to no one but his supervisor and those who crossed his path at work, and slowly exiled those outside of work who might once have considered him fondly; when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1922, he had gathered a small circle of people who haunted the same places, and by 1925 he had jettisoned such people as irrelevant, replacing them with silence. It was all right. Many were pairing up and marrying, moving for work, completing other acts which to him seemed as alien as taking wing and flying away.
This quiet life lasted until the spring of 1925.
The feeling would settle just after three in the afternoon. A humming behind his eyes. The promise of a mad energy that would shake and propel him while darkness ruled. Still, he would work the day, return home, eat a meal in his bachelor apartment and then stare at the bed. His mind seemed to fill more and more with vitriol, dark images and fear as the night wore on. The radio did not help. Reading did not help.
Syme walked the parks at night. He would walk in the dark, often keeping from the light, imagining he was swimming in the black. The moon hung over him like an enormous eye and Syme would find himself staring at it, sometimes for hours. In the morning he would drag himself home in the dim morning light, dress, and go to work, exhausted. Still he could not sleep. This schedule became his life, for a time.
At some point late in March, Syme’s schedule skipped the tracks. He does not recall when this behavior slipped over into full delirium, he only remembers a sweet fade into a perfect state of being—no fear or doubt or even anger, just existence. Movement. Screaming. Blurred faces. A feeling of ebullient expectance. A fevered joy.
He woke on April 3 in St. Cuthbert’s Hospital, and was told that he had been in the grips of a fever which had unbalanced him mentally. He had harmed no one, but had wandered the city in a haze until he collapsed while screaming at the moon in Anacostia Park three nights before. His fever had crested and collapsed the evening before. The doctors said he would now be well.
Even though library’s director was understanding, Syme quit his job the next week. He prepared a curriculum vitae and applied at the government office. The next month, he began employment at the Office of Naval Intelligence. This notion had seized him suddenly and perfectly, and he found that even considering other possibilities hurt his mind.
It was a fresh start.
∆
He finishes the rote copying of the file by one thirty in the morning, working without break. Mimicking all he finds in the one file, down to the smallest detail, Syme painstakingly staples the photographs at exact angles in the doppelganger report, traces and adds perfect duplicates of handwritten notes which haunt its columns, and onionskins the sign-out sheet, adding his name to the list beneath that of Captain Johnson on both files.
He places the folders next to one another. It would be difficult for the person who had originally fashioned it to tell the difference. Such was his work. He picks both up, walks the short distance to Mears’ desk, places them on it, locks the door and leaves.
In the empty hall, the church-like feeling of the building continues. Polished marble floors and dim lights and wood and the smell of old cigarettes. No one is here except at the charge desk downstairs where a single Navy man stands guard.
Syme walks down the darkened stairs.
∆
The man who left Syme at Park Green as a baby was a sailor from Boston named O’Donogh. He died in a flop-house in Shanghai in 1921, choked on his own vomit, his body seizing like it was trying to eject the foulness he had filled it with over the years. When he was found by the land-lady, his body was searched and then dropped in a mass grave for paupers on a rise overlooking the East China Sea.
His body is still there, what of it is left, in the mud, in the dark.
He was a drunk fisherman from Boston, and it was there he took up with a woman in 1901, the only woman who would have him. This was before the drugs and the gambling. The woman was a local from Southhook, but whose people had come from downstate. She had an odd cast about her, but she put up with O’Donogh’s ways and set about attempting to make a home for him, and, soon after, for the child they would have.
She was not exactly ugly. Instead, it was as if some subtle force had shifted her features so they failed, precisely, to line up. She looked a little like the reflection in a funhouse mirror. She was short and had large eyes.
They never married. Her name is not important.
When the baby came, the delivery was brief, but the woman took ill while O’Donogh marveled at the gap-mouthed child their coupling had fashioned. The woman died shortly after the baby came, despite the intervention of a doctor. Something else came out as well. Something half-formed and forgotten by the body that had shaped the baby. Something bulbous, wriggling and blue-black. It died soon after as well.
O’Donogh left the living child at Park Green and took to the bottle. From there his life meandered until he beached himself in Shanghai. Even in 1921, even in the days leading up to his overdose, O’Donogh would think of the baby and the woman.
He would think that he should have left that place earlier. That he should have killed the woman and the child inside her. That he should have walked away without taking the mewling thing with him. That he should have left them both to rot.
That thing, which became Albert Syme, will never know any of this.
∆
Syme has no conception of God. Religion has no place for him, but several times—though he does not clearly recall this—he has felt something brush up against his life. Like the hand of some unseen giant, redirecting things for him, pushing him in certain directions, making his decisions and actions clearer, easier.
He felt it most strongly in the spring of 1925.
Tonight that feeling is with him, and with it comes the elation of certainty. The confusion he felt earlier has fallen away, leaving in its wake a quiet thrumming, filling his mind, allowing room for nothing else.
∆
The first person to enter the building on Washington Avenue the next morning sees the blood. From there the moments drop like dominoes, one after the other. The Navy man who watched the door is dead, sprawled behind the desk. He was struck on the side of the face with something metallic and heavy (a three hole punch) and then beaten for ten minutes with the base of the nearby flagpole. The flag of the Navy and American flag lie wrinkled on the ground, soaked in blood.
The Navy man’s head is split like gourd, spewing pink tissue that looks like fat and blood so dark it is black. His gun is gone, but it is later found beneath a credenza across the way in the same lobby.
In Room 3118 they find Norman and Mears. Norman, too has been bludgeoned. Mears, it appears, walked in on it and met a similar fate. The two men were dragged and stacked in a corner, away from the desks, under the photograph of Captain Johnson and the hot pot, where their fluids settled and pooled, leaving them pale.
Flies have gathered in the room through the open window.
On Mears’ desk there are no files. Instead there is an incinerated pile of paper fragments, burned in a stainless steel garbage pail.
By ten A.M. the police are looking for Syme. Detectives arrive at his apartment and find an empty cube with a bed, some Reader’s Digests, some food and little else. No photographs, no address books. Syme’s clothes and goods are in order. He has not been here.
By noon the Navy has stepped in. Their own intelligence personnel begin to look for Syme, and the police agree to remain quiet. It is in the national interest, after all.
∆
The night before, Albert Syme walks away from the building, his hands bloodied, his mouth in a grin. He stumbles in a way which keeps the few people he sees on the street from paying attention to him, like a man being continuously subjected to random movements of the body, a palsy.
He walks for what seems like a long time until he finally finds what he seeks. When he does, a calmness fills him and the tics in his muscles subside.
The Potomac glitters beneath him in the summer night, smelling like a million dead fish left to rot in the sun. Syme undresses madly, ripping at his clothes, tearing his shirt, ripping the zipper free on his trousers. He casts his clothes aside. He will not need them again.
He hops down the retaining wall, naked, invigorated. When his foot touches the water—cool but not cold—he practically collapses under the force of ecstasy.
He enters the water perfectly, silently, and begins to swim south, down and out of the Potomac into Chesapeake Bay, and from there into the depths of the Atlantic. The stickiness of the blood on his fingers is replaced by the cooling numbness of the salt water.
The feeling which fills him and spills over into the night is unlike anything the orphan Syme has ever felt. The nuns never gave him this. His adoptive parents never gave him this. His real parents never gave him this. It is a feeling of finding respite in a world filled with danger. Of a small place where everything can be perfect. Something waits for him out there, in the dark.
Albert Syme is going home.
Albert Syme is an odd sort who keeps to himself. Floppy and dire, he looks like a clerk, and that’s what he is; one of the thousands that haunt the lunch carts on Washington Avenue at noon. Syme’s glasses hang on the end of his nose like a man poised at the edge of a cliff. His eyes look at you precisely like those of a gecko sunning itself. They are blank and green and flat, and he stares for too long. People don’t look at him. It’s not because he’s imposing. He’s precisely the opposite, small and long-armed and bulging in the middle. It’s not because he seems dangerous. He looks somewhat simple, slick like he was dolloped in a thin grease, and empty in the face.
The reason people don’t look at him is that he’s forgettable.
At this moment, Albert Syme is as close to normal as he ever will be.
Syme works for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Precisely four people know this, and only his boss and the one other person in his office know his name. The two ladies who sit in the Navy desk opposite the ONI collation room know he’s there but don’t know who he is. He supposes the bank might know—his pay draft being supplied by the Office of the Navy, after all. He says nothing to anyone else. His barber. His landlady. To them, he is a receipt. He has no family (they gave him up in Boston) and no friends.
Such things worry Syme. Sometimes, at work, he plays a game where he draws lines, like pipes, from name to name in his mind, connecting all who might know the secret. It doesn’t really matter, he supposes, but he still worries. He imagines his name filling with water, sees the liquid moving in the dark of the pipes, drowning the names of those connected to him. He pictures the people in their tubes, drowning as the water rushes in, in the dark.
He smiles when he thinks these things. His secret, his job, is the most important thing in his life.
The job is his life, though he couldn’t tell you why.
Now, July 19, 1928, he eats a hot dog in the summer sun, grasping it in one ink-stained hand while holding his hat down to keep it from catching the breeze and tumbling up the walk. He is surrounded by hundreds of people who fail to see him, lost in their own lunches, conversations, lives. He eats with the conviction and blankness of an animal. He does this every day when the weather is fine.
When he finishes, he crumples up the hot dog’s wax paper wrapper and drops it to the cement. He glances at the ink on his hand and heads back up the steps of the huge, stone building, crossing from the light of the sun into the shadow of the portico. As he crosses from outside to in, the wind catches his hat but he snatches it from the air before it can get away.
He goes inside and continues the last day of his daily routine.
∆
If Syme had left ten minutes later, he would have seen the officers arrive. Three men in Navy dress, one a captain with a valise handcuffed to his arm. In this building that is not unusual, but this man was special. His name tag read JOHNSON. Syme would have recognized him from the photo on the wall next to the hot pot. He stares at it every day. The two men with the captain were built in the exact way Syme is not. They were human walls with legs, wearing truncheons and pistols on their hips. They did not smile or speak.
These men entered the ONI collation room and the captain spoke with Syme’s supervisor, Templeton Mears, a man who always looks as if he had just survived some near disaster. Mears listened to the description of the job the captain had in mind, and before he could finish Mears swung a hand towards Syme’s desk. Mears barely contained the black terror he felt speaking to the Director of Naval Intelligence. As they spoke, it looked as if Mears’ eyes would continue to grow until they engulfed his whole face.
When the captain was done, the valise was opened and papers were removed, as well as two manilla envelopes which stank of photographic chemicals. They were placed squarely in the center of Syme’s desk. Mears signed a paper for them, and the men left. Immediately Mears fell into his wood chair, which squeaked under his weight. He covered his eyes with his hands.
The room fell back into the drone of the electric clock ticking time.
If he had been there, Syme would have seen all of this. Instead, he was outside, eating his hot dog.
∆
Syme does not like his boss. Mr. Mears is a slack man. He fails to do what is required by the job. He slinks in and out at odd hours. He piles work on Syme’s desk. He reads funny books and sports annuals and flips through the encyclopedias which line the wood-grained walls, leaving Syme and the other man in the office, Norman, to finish the collation. Norman is not efficient, but cares about his work. Syme does not hate Norman. Instead, he feels about Norman the way he feels about the people who ride the #13 bus with him on the way to work. They are there the reason he is there, and as long as they don’t bother him, he will not bother them.
What they do in the room, besides being secret, is boring. They pull Navy files, type and collate copies, staple photographs, cross-check ID numbers and collect them for closed envelope reports. They hand-duplicate files, sometimes many times over. These reports are numbered and are picked up once a week by an armed Navy officer. Where they go from there, no one in the room has any idea. For Norman it is a source of endless speculation. For Mears it is a unconsidered question. For Syme it is an indication that what they do here, in the ONI Collation Office, room 3118, is important.
Syme enters and finds Mears’ desk empty. Norman sits at his smaller, steel desk, hunched over it, his jacket off, sweat on his thick brow and in his thinning brown hair. Norman leans over a sheet of graphing paper and draws a careful line on it with a mechanical pencil. He does this with his tongue pinched between his yellow teeth. Norman often has to hand-draw maps. It is something Syme does not have an eye for.
“What is this document?” Syme asks the room, his back to Norman’s back.
Norman’s pencil stops on the sheet and he turns. His face is round and red and Irish. His mouth hangs open. His empty blue eyes stare at Syme’s back without any recognition of the fact that Syme was speaking to him.
Syme hefts the folders and holds them up without turning around.
“Some big wheel brought that down from the Chief of Naval Operations. I wasn’t here. Just Mears. Mears told me.”
“Where is Mears?”
Norman laughs, repeats the question in a whisper as if it were a joke, and goes back to work.
Syme removes his jacket, catching a whiff of his body odor in the process, folds the coat and drops it over the edge of his chair. He sits, pulls in his chair, carefully arranges his tools on the table—his typewriter, his India ink, his fountain pen, his mechanical pencil, stapler, eraser, ink eraser, paperclips and onionskins.
When this is done, he opens the photographic envelopes first. This has become a habit for him. He likes to guess what the report might be by looking at the photos. Photographs of wreckage usually mean foreign technology intelligence; bodies usually mean accidents; grainy photos are often spy shots of foreign fleets; photos of people usually mean suspected spies. There will be the original and for each original a copy.
Today when he looks at the first image, he has no idea what the report might contain.
The photograph is of an eye in extreme close-up. It is huge, bulbous and black, hanging on the skin of some creature, skin which looks like it is flaking off in diamond-shaped chunks. A human hand is barely visible in the upper right corner, out of focus, holding a wooden ruler with large hash-marks. The ruler indicates the eye is three and a quarter inches across. Even though the whole creature is not visible, Syme can see it is dead. He is not precisely sure why he knows this.
Something pulled from the ocean by some Navy destroyer?
Syme blinks, staring at the photo, and adjusts his glasses as if that might somehow help.
Finally, in an attempt to jumpstart his work, he unshuffles the stack of photos and papers in a fan on his desk, like a deck of cards.
He sits still for a long time.
Then he reads.
∆
Syme was born with a cleft palate. The man who left him at the Park Green hospital in Boston said that was why he did so, but Syme does not know this or the man. He was left one evening in June, which has since become his birthday, by a man in sailor’s garb whose hands were covered in blood as if he had delivered the child himself.
He was marked as UBB CPl in the registry, Unknown Baby Boy, Cleft Palate. He was assigned a number and held there in the children’s ward, separated from the other children as if his face might infect them, in an area jokingly called Bastard Hall.
He was taken by the Catholic Charities precisely because of his cleft palate. He was moved to a house that had an assortment of children the world had disfigured, either by the hand of man or by genetics. Syme was was two months old when he arrived.
Today, his face is seamless.
He knows some of this, but not much. He has not had the continuity of a family narrative to tell him this. Instead he has inferred it from a strange ridge on the inside of his mouth, and from what the charity house people told him. Sister Rosita had called him a very lucky little boy, and even then, even at five, Syme had realized she didn’t just mean because of his adoption. His life after the orphanage was a life where he was held at arm’s length. Provided for. Smiled at. Sent to school. But when he left the house of the people the government called his parents, he never went back. It was the life before the adoption that kept his mind rapt.
In the back of Syme’s mind he can still recall struggling to speak, moving his tongue around the gap in the front of his face, and the whistling noise it would sometimes make when he breathed. To him, this feeling is so old—his face seems fine now—that it is like considering a long forgotten wound.
Until he was two, his face had a hole in it with a spray of ill-formed teeth that cut from his upper lip to the base of his nose. He doesn’t really know this. He has no photographs. But every year Syme seemed to change. The wards noticed first that his nose seemed to straighten and flatten from what had been the shape of a split mushroom. A thick webbing of scar tissue filled the gap near the front of his mouth, which, over time, closed like a slow-healing wound. Finally his lip knit itself up like a zipper closing. This process took two years. It was so slow that the few who saw him often enough to notice were never certain what was happening, but it disturbed some of them.
Only Sister Rosita knew him from when he came to the charity house to when he left, and she called Syme a miracle. If Syme was asked to describe his life in one word, “miracle” would not be in the running.
∆
It is just after seven in the evening when Syme looks up again. Outside, he can see the electric lights from Grant Park through the large, curved window, which otherwise throws back a reflection of the entire room over the black of night. His head is buzzing like the clock.
Norman must have crept off some time before, saying nothing, shutting the door quietly to avoid interacting with Syme. In his typical manner, Mears had never returned. The building feels vast and empty, but Syme is used to being here at odd hours.
When it is empty, the building feels like a church.
Syme has finished reading the file he was to copy, and is having a hard time finding a point in the narrative to grab hold of and fold into a suitable shape to fit in his mind. It is not just the photos, which on their own are extremely disturbing. It is not the fact that the Federal government has seized the populace of an entire New England town in secret and interred them. It is not the fact that the report includes after-action statements from submarine commanders indicating torpedoes were fired. It is not even the agglomeration of these facts. It is what is left out of the report.
The holes in the report say things. They say that man is not the only intelligent resident of this world. They say that people can breed with inhuman . . . things . . . and that cities of their kind dot the bottom of oceans all over the world. They say the Navy has discovered an enemy which lives in the sea, and which had until now gone undiscovered. The report screams this without ever saying it outright.
A Marine battalion, heavy weapons, full combat, torpedoes—as always, the Navy is deadly serious. It is only when this narrative is inserted into the photos that the story takes off on its own, a looping film of black and white in Syme’s mind.
His mind moves through pages and ties them up with photographs. In his mind’s eye, the photos enter the lines of text and vice versa, and when they are inextricably linked up they spin and spin, refusing to leave his brain.
Two photographs in particular occupy his thoughts for some time.
One is of what might have once been a woman. Her face is fixed in the wax-like repose of death. Her neck is bloated and crisscrossed by mottled veins and scars. Her white hair is thinned to the point where her peeling scalp shines in the light of the flashbulb. Her eyes are huge and watery and turned at different angles. Her shirt, which looks like something from a Victorian play, is punctured by holes and where her torso is punched open, a thin liquid has poured out, something other than blood. Even that is not so bad. Above the waist she is hideous, dead but not inhuman. Below the waist, the body explodes into madness.
Her hips begin normally and then split into five limbs. The skirt which once covered the nightmare is rolled up and folded back. The limbs are mottled and scaly and fraught with dewclaws and teeth and strange webbing. They all end the same, in a dumb flipper the size of a forearm. No toes, nothing resembling a foot. Just gray-white flippers.
The second photograph is of two of these things. Living. Standing behind barbed wire fencing, lit by headlight or klieg. They stand upright. Both are male. One a child. The big one is an older man with a white beard, a pea coat and an odd, antiquated cap. Outside the wire in the background, the silhouettes of two Marines overlook the scene.
Both captives have strange, bulging throats, short legs, long arms and wide, reflective, shining eyes, watery eyes that are pools of light, staring into the camera. The man has his teeth bared, and they are tiny fish teeth, small, angled and perfect. The man hugs the boy protectively.
Syme does not know why he focuses on these photographs.
∆
Syme almost died of a fever in the spring of 1925. The problem began with insomnia. He found, quite suddenly, he could no longer sleep through the night. Where he had once retired to bed and woken (without alarm) at the proper time, he found himself full of terrible energy. Lying in bed, even sitting still at night, felt wrong. Instead, it seemed that he should walk, run, dance, scream. The energy, which grew as the sun fell, was at first strangely exhilarating and later frightening, like too much current put through a circuit which began to heat and then melt.
He had not yet started at the Navy. He worked as a clerk at the Regis library. There he began what would later become his dull lifestyle, something which no doubt had aided him in securing a job at the Office of the Navy. He spoke to no one but his supervisor and those who crossed his path at work, and slowly exiled those outside of work who might once have considered him fondly; when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1922, he had gathered a small circle of people who haunted the same places, and by 1925 he had jettisoned such people as irrelevant, replacing them with silence. It was all right. Many were pairing up and marrying, moving for work, completing other acts which to him seemed as alien as taking wing and flying away.
This quiet life lasted until the spring of 1925.
The feeling would settle just after three in the afternoon. A humming behind his eyes. The promise of a mad energy that would shake and propel him while darkness ruled. Still, he would work the day, return home, eat a meal in his bachelor apartment and then stare at the bed. His mind seemed to fill more and more with vitriol, dark images and fear as the night wore on. The radio did not help. Reading did not help.
Syme walked the parks at night. He would walk in the dark, often keeping from the light, imagining he was swimming in the black. The moon hung over him like an enormous eye and Syme would find himself staring at it, sometimes for hours. In the morning he would drag himself home in the dim morning light, dress, and go to work, exhausted. Still he could not sleep. This schedule became his life, for a time.
At some point late in March, Syme’s schedule skipped the tracks. He does not recall when this behavior slipped over into full delirium, he only remembers a sweet fade into a perfect state of being—no fear or doubt or even anger, just existence. Movement. Screaming. Blurred faces. A feeling of ebullient expectance. A fevered joy.
He woke on April 3 in St. Cuthbert’s Hospital, and was told that he had been in the grips of a fever which had unbalanced him mentally. He had harmed no one, but had wandered the city in a haze until he collapsed while screaming at the moon in Anacostia Park three nights before. His fever had crested and collapsed the evening before. The doctors said he would now be well.
Even though library’s director was understanding, Syme quit his job the next week. He prepared a curriculum vitae and applied at the government office. The next month, he began employment at the Office of Naval Intelligence. This notion had seized him suddenly and perfectly, and he found that even considering other possibilities hurt his mind.
It was a fresh start.
∆
He finishes the rote copying of the file by one thirty in the morning, working without break. Mimicking all he finds in the one file, down to the smallest detail, Syme painstakingly staples the photographs at exact angles in the doppelganger report, traces and adds perfect duplicates of handwritten notes which haunt its columns, and onionskins the sign-out sheet, adding his name to the list beneath that of Captain Johnson on both files.
He places the folders next to one another. It would be difficult for the person who had originally fashioned it to tell the difference. Such was his work. He picks both up, walks the short distance to Mears’ desk, places them on it, locks the door and leaves.
In the empty hall, the church-like feeling of the building continues. Polished marble floors and dim lights and wood and the smell of old cigarettes. No one is here except at the charge desk downstairs where a single Navy man stands guard.
Syme walks down the darkened stairs.
∆
The man who left Syme at Park Green as a baby was a sailor from Boston named O’Donogh. He died in a flop-house in Shanghai in 1921, choked on his own vomit, his body seizing like it was trying to eject the foulness he had filled it with over the years. When he was found by the land-lady, his body was searched and then dropped in a mass grave for paupers on a rise overlooking the East China Sea.
His body is still there, what of it is left, in the mud, in the dark.
He was a drunk fisherman from Boston, and it was there he took up with a woman in 1901, the only woman who would have him. This was before the drugs and the gambling. The woman was a local from Southhook, but whose people had come from downstate. She had an odd cast about her, but she put up with O’Donogh’s ways and set about attempting to make a home for him, and, soon after, for the child they would have.
She was not exactly ugly. Instead, it was as if some subtle force had shifted her features so they failed, precisely, to line up. She looked a little like the reflection in a funhouse mirror. She was short and had large eyes.
They never married. Her name is not important.
When the baby came, the delivery was brief, but the woman took ill while O’Donogh marveled at the gap-mouthed child their coupling had fashioned. The woman died shortly after the baby came, despite the intervention of a doctor. Something else came out as well. Something half-formed and forgotten by the body that had shaped the baby. Something bulbous, wriggling and blue-black. It died soon after as well.
O’Donogh left the living child at Park Green and took to the bottle. From there his life meandered until he beached himself in Shanghai. Even in 1921, even in the days leading up to his overdose, O’Donogh would think of the baby and the woman.
He would think that he should have left that place earlier. That he should have killed the woman and the child inside her. That he should have walked away without taking the mewling thing with him. That he should have left them both to rot.
That thing, which became Albert Syme, will never know any of this.
∆
Syme has no conception of God. Religion has no place for him, but several times—though he does not clearly recall this—he has felt something brush up against his life. Like the hand of some unseen giant, redirecting things for him, pushing him in certain directions, making his decisions and actions clearer, easier.
He felt it most strongly in the spring of 1925.
Tonight that feeling is with him, and with it comes the elation of certainty. The confusion he felt earlier has fallen away, leaving in its wake a quiet thrumming, filling his mind, allowing room for nothing else.
∆
The first person to enter the building on Washington Avenue the next morning sees the blood. From there the moments drop like dominoes, one after the other. The Navy man who watched the door is dead, sprawled behind the desk. He was struck on the side of the face with something metallic and heavy (a three hole punch) and then beaten for ten minutes with the base of the nearby flagpole. The flag of the Navy and American flag lie wrinkled on the ground, soaked in blood.
The Navy man’s head is split like gourd, spewing pink tissue that looks like fat and blood so dark it is black. His gun is gone, but it is later found beneath a credenza across the way in the same lobby.
In Room 3118 they find Norman and Mears. Norman, too has been bludgeoned. Mears, it appears, walked in on it and met a similar fate. The two men were dragged and stacked in a corner, away from the desks, under the photograph of Captain Johnson and the hot pot, where their fluids settled and pooled, leaving them pale.
Flies have gathered in the room through the open window.
On Mears’ desk there are no files. Instead there is an incinerated pile of paper fragments, burned in a stainless steel garbage pail.
By ten A.M. the police are looking for Syme. Detectives arrive at his apartment and find an empty cube with a bed, some Reader’s Digests, some food and little else. No photographs, no address books. Syme’s clothes and goods are in order. He has not been here.
By noon the Navy has stepped in. Their own intelligence personnel begin to look for Syme, and the police agree to remain quiet. It is in the national interest, after all.
∆
The night before, Albert Syme walks away from the building, his hands bloodied, his mouth in a grin. He stumbles in a way which keeps the few people he sees on the street from paying attention to him, like a man being continuously subjected to random movements of the body, a palsy.
He walks for what seems like a long time until he finally finds what he seeks. When he does, a calmness fills him and the tics in his muscles subside.
The Potomac glitters beneath him in the summer night, smelling like a million dead fish left to rot in the sun. Syme undresses madly, ripping at his clothes, tearing his shirt, ripping the zipper free on his trousers. He casts his clothes aside. He will not need them again.
He hops down the retaining wall, naked, invigorated. When his foot touches the water—cool but not cold—he practically collapses under the force of ecstasy.
He enters the water perfectly, silently, and begins to swim south, down and out of the Potomac into Chesapeake Bay, and from there into the depths of the Atlantic. The stickiness of the blood on his fingers is replaced by the cooling numbness of the salt water.
The feeling which fills him and spills over into the night is unlike anything the orphan Syme has ever felt. The nuns never gave him this. His adoptive parents never gave him this. His real parents never gave him this. It is a feeling of finding respite in a world filled with danger. Of a small place where everything can be perfect. Something waits for him out there, in the dark.
Albert Syme is going home.
Los relatos abarcan desde la redada de 1928 que dio inicio a Delta Green, aun futuro próximo donde la comprensión humana es más poderosa que nunca.
Delta Green: Failed Anatomies arrancarácomo un proyecto Kickstarter, se espera que en Noviembre 2013. Los mecenas de Failed Anatomies obtendrán el libro en digital para descargar tan pronto como finalice, además de exclusivos enlaces para solicitar la versión rústica o tapa dura, a una fracción de su precio.
"Punching": mostrar
El relato original se encuentra AQUI
Punching
By Dennis Detwiller, © 2011
The Vega crawls up the drive to the house in the dark, and the driver, Henry Briggs, leans forward over the wheel to consider the house as he cruises past it. He pulls in next to the other cars — a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a Rolls — and gets out. In the row of darkened cars his Vega looks out of place. It’s even parked unevenly, while the others are in a perfect row. He tries to make a joke out of this in his mind, but finds with some bitterness that he can’t.
He stops once, on his way from the cars, and finds himself looking on a perfect, seamless, manicured lawn which stretches out into a dark copse of trees. He wishes he didn’t feel impressed, but he does. The house has changed, and in that change has only become better than it was.
Briggs is a big, older man. Someone who once might have been a boxer. His features look like they had been set to drift by one too many hard punches. But the eyes above his ruined nose are small and clever. He’s in a suit, the one he wears to work on Wednesdays, that looks two steps too low for this social strata. He looks as uncomfortable as he is. He straightens his tie and crosses the drive to the house.
It’s a big Newport house. Bleached wood, big windows, dozens of rooms, manicured garden, crushed gravel drive. It is as far from the place that Briggs lives, or exists, as is possible.
It is the end of summer, 1964.
∆
He opens the door to the sound of a hundred voices. The house is full of people, all his age, walking, talking, eating, drinking. A black man sits at a Baby Grand piano playing music twenty years out of date.
A paper banner hangs over the gable windows in the back, covering the edge of the high ceiling. It reads “WELCOME CLASS OF ’44”.
Briggs walks to the bar and orders a double gin and tonic, and the bartender, sensing an out-of-place soul, pours generously. Briggs stands at the bar, over the bar, really, watching the crowd, sipping the drink.
By 1944 it was over. The year 1943 was when his life was ruined, and that thought, he thinks, is just as useless as any other, even though it is true. He drinks the drink.
∆
Briggs has killed many people. Too many to count, really. He lost count by 1944. By 1944, when he was in Italy, it was already too late, and he hasn’t really tried to puzzle it out since then. The last killing was two weeks ago. A woman who was twenty-six years old by her passport. He doesn’t feel bad about it.
Something was in her, using her, something from outside. He put a bullet through her face and she launched herself at him, struggling and cackling black laughter while ooze that looked like butter gone over poured out of the hole through her head. She wrestled like she was twice her size. She was so strong Briggs barely had time to pin her arms down with his legs and bludgeon her — it — to death with a heavy bronze lamp.
Then he burned the building to the ground.
Killing wasn’t all that bad when you learned what was really going on. Death was a rule of the world, everyone knew that. It was how systems renewed themselves. It was beautiful, in a way. Killing these other things, though — these other things didn’t die on their own. Something in reality had slipped a spoke and they ran on and on. It was up to the group to punch their ticket. He had done many such things for the group since 1943. Since any semblance of normal life had ended.
No one knew what the things were, really. He had heard some in the group go on and on about Elder Ones and cycles and elliptical orbits of dead stars that ruined the world every 900 million years. He’d seen reports on time gates and ray guns and things that, if they slipped past the net the group had raised, could destabilize the whole world.
Once, he saw something huge and gelatinous and covered in a thousand eyes crawl up from a hand-carved pit in Peru, struggle over the ledge, and consume a tied-up goat with the avidity of a spider feeding on a fly.
That was okay. There were worse things, really.
∆
When he sees Pete Martin, his mind drifts back. He can’t help it. He’s like a goddamn school girl. Martin, his friend. The man he most admired. The guy he had followed around like an idiot.
The man who introduced him to Commander Cook.
Well, indirectly.
Martin looks like what he is. Rich. He drifts through the crowd as if on rollers, a drink filled near to spilling in one large, soft hand. Martin is tall and thin and regal. His face has dark rings under the eyes, but they almost look like makeup. This is a man who would have to puzzle out how, exactly, to use a shovel. To drive a car. To do anything. Things were, are, done for him.
It has always been that way. These were the rules Briggs grew up with. The rich were the rich, the poor were the poor. When a crossover occurred, is was due to luck, skill, or some indefinable quality.
Briggs had all three.
When he was eighteen years old, he had been stupid and naive and young enough to believe that made him special.
∆
After 1941, Harvard was a ghost ship. Classes were shells of what they once had been. Hallways abandoned. Dorms silent. But Briggs was eager. He had worked delivering ice for nine summers to get here. He had cracked the books and had spun up his gift with languages into something valuable. People had noticed.
He didn’t look the sort that could translate Bing Crosby into Greek, but he was. His father had it, he had it. He could hear something once and repeat it perfectly. His dad called it the magic ear. But Briggs had something more than that catgut salesman ever had—he had a hunger for something more than a two-room walkup in Mercator. He was more than a man who smiled and looked down when someone yelled at him over a ten cent shortage. He was a person.
He wanted to be important.
The boxing helped. The college needed boxers. Or at least they had in September 1941, the year he started in Linguistics. He never even laced up, not once, for the school; there was no one to box. Didn’t matter. He didn’t like fighting, he was just good at it, and only then because of his size and reach. There was no real skill he could discern in beating another man senseless.
The school was abandoned. The war had siphoned nearly everyone away. Those who remained were scrawny, sickly, or had something obviously wrong with their anatomy.
Briggs and Martin stood out. Briggs, of course, was in his prime. Huge and imposing and dangerous-looking. Martin looked normal for Harvard. Young and rich and content, with a Cheshire smile on his face all the time like he was in on the big secret.
No one had called Briggs up. There was no letter, no draft notice, and he would be damned if he would volunteer after what he did to get here. If they came for him, that was one thing. If not, he’d get his damn degree. He could give a fuck about the war. He had his own war.
It had been that way since he returned to class from the 1941 Christmas break. The break was dire. Cousins and uncles and friends and others talking about joining up. About reporting in. About turning up for the Navy, because that was the safest, or the Army, because it would all be over before it even started, or the Army Air Corps because, hell, then you got to fly. Even then, before Guadalcanal, no one wanted to join the Marines.
Briggs had nodded and smiled and excused himself, and when the time came he slunk back to Harvard and kept to his books and kept his head down and tried not to talk to anyone outside the rarified life of languages. He half expected a letter any day, a plain letter typed by some fat woman in an office in Washington, calling him to line up and be shot.
It never came. Instead, one day he looked up in Hieratic and Pre-Hieratic and saw Martin sitting there in a row of empty seats, watching him. Peter Martin. Smiling.
∆
Martin was part of the club. If you had to ask which club, you would never know. The two struck up an unlikely friendship over the fall of 1942, back before Briggs knew what Martin was really thinking. Briggs, for his part, didn’t care.
He simply wanted in the club, so of course he never spoke about it. The club made men. It manufactured leaders, presidents, generals. It created greatness from nothing and flung it out into the world.
“You can’t understand what it’s like in Newport,” Martin would say over deviled eggs and drinks at the Box, and Briggs knew he was right and hated that feeling. He couldn’t know what it was like to be secure in his own skin, to be waited on, to feel the pull of others as they desperately tried to get your attention.
Briggs believed Martin saw him as a project, as a possible future member of the club, which, like the university, had emptied. It still held its rites, but with only a fraction of the membership. No one had been punched — given entry to the club — since the war started. There were rumblings that this famine of membership would not last.
Briggs made Martin his project. The lonely rich kid would become his friend. And in time, it happened. For reasons which would become clear later.
“You’re right, I can’t understand it. So show me,” Briggs said. That summer, Martin did.
∆
Peter’s father was Edgar Martin, an ex-Navy man who had inherited something terribly important, although no indication of it could be detected in their house on Nantucket.
The old man looked like someone had smashed his head down between his shoulder blades with a shovel at some distant point in the past. When he turned to face someone, his whole body swiveled at the waist. His eyes were large and liquid behind thick glasses held with solder in a gaudy gold-wired frame. It was his only real point of extravagance, besides his family.
Even in the summer of 1942 on the island, Mr. Martin wore the outfit of a wealthy bookkeeper, with a full wool waistcoat and all. He had warmed to Henry Briggs after bombarding him with a bevy of questions which seemed designed to embarrass or confuse him. They had done neither. Briggs had answered honestly while Peter looked on with amusement, perched on the edge of an ancient, weather-wrecked wood chair in chinos and sandals.
The test, whatever it was, had been passed. Edgar Martin now called him Henry, and was candid with him in a way he never seemed to be with his own son. Briggs was certain he was getting somewhere.
Still, he had no idea where.
The summer dragged on and as the world burned, Henry read, slept, ate and slowly changed color, plotting to find his place in a future where people would look to him and not away.
∆
The night in August when he ran into Edgar Martin in the rambling house was the first indication that he should have been paying more attention.
“You seem like a good boy, Henry, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” Edgar said, holding a glass of milk beaded with moisture, looking out a window on a black beach.
“Sir?” Henry said, pulling the robe tighter.
“Martin hasn’t tried — hasn’t done anything strange? That you would think strange?”
The question fell on the ground and silence followed it.
“No,” Briggs finally replied, though he had no idea what they were talking about.
“Good. Good. I think you might be a good influence on him. Try and keep him out of trouble.”
Briggs went back upstairs and didn’t think about that conversation again until after it all fell apart.
∆
Someone is talking about LBJ again, and Briggs looks up from his third glass to find Martin staring at him, just as they had met, eye-to-eye, for the first time in 1941. Briggs widens his smirk into a smile, one that feels completely fake, and waves. Martin excuses himself from the beautiful woman who is speaking at him and walks over.
“Henry! How the heck are you, man?” Martin says, smiling, hand extended.
Briggs stands from the stool, wipes his right hand on his trousers, grab what seems to be a handkerchief from his jacket with his other hand and turns. He shakes hands with Martin and glances around the room. No one sees the .38.
The first bullet catches Martin in the cheek, leaving a pock-mark the size of a cigarette burn, and the smile — that contented smile — hardens into a thin-lipped grimace as the powder-flash burns his face. Something red, wet and gelatinous launches itself from the back of Martin’s head, landing on the ground like a dishful of water flung out the back door.
Martin falls forward, collapsing in a heap like a marionette with its strings clipped, folding in an unnatural position. Briggs empties the gun into Martin’s slumped body, four more rounds at close range in his neck and back.
Martin bounces on the ground with each hit, convulsing. Then he slowly slides to the right and rolls over, covered in black and red viscera and blood. His blue eyes are tinged with yellow. Peter Martin, whatever was Peter Martin, is gone.
When Briggs looks up, his ears ringing, the room is empty, like a magic trick. He sits back down and sips ice water.
∆
In 1943, Briggs felt he was close. They had skirted the basics of the club; how one was punched, how one might be admitted. Martin talked about it now, though never by name. He talked and talked about how Henry might fit in, how others like him had gained membership before. He told stories of where they ended up, the glorious achievements of those who were punched.
Henry was so excited, he didn’t even pull away when Martin kissed him, suddenly, for the first time in the darkened hallway at Widener Library.
From there things moved fast.
Henry Briggs hadn’t been certain of the limits of what he might do to escape his old life. The spring and summer of 1943 proved that if there were any limits, sleeping with Peter Martin was not one of them. He never considered whether or not it was something he really wanted. At the time, it just seemed to happen.
∆
It failed as you might imagine, suddenly. At the end the affair tumbled in slow motion, like a car wreck played back at 1/8 speed. Bodies, glass and metal tumbling, some crushed, some thrown free.
When Henry staggered to his feet again, he had been dismissed from Harvard. Peter disappeared into the monied escapes his family had prepared for him. Henry’s hopes for school, for the group, vanished like a fog. He was left a survivor the wreck of his life, wandering.
It was three months later, and he was hauling ice again, when Edgar Martin’s car pulled up. When the door opened for Briggs, he got in without a word being exchanged.
∆
“My son is ill,” Edgar said. “We have known this for a long time.”
Henry said nothing.
“I would appreciate if nothing was said of this. And you, Henry, I have kept my eye out for you, too.”
Henry looked up.
“There is a man who has been watching you, a man who has interest in the languages you know. A man I once worked with. A man from the government.” Edgar considered the buildings as they rolled past. “Would you like to meet him?”
Henry said nothing.
They kept driving.
Commander Cook sat in the darkened library of an old house, waiting outside town with a fat folder full of horrors to snap Henry out of his life forever.
∆
And now he is here, in 1964, being shouted at through a bullhorn by police.
Henry Briggs snaps the revolver open, dumps the shells, and reloads with blunt fingers. One round, two rounds, three rounds, four. He has no idea what might happen when he closes the cylinder. But it strikes him now, the humor of it.
The cylinder clicks shut. He brings the gun up.
He pictures the bullet entering his head and failing at its purpose. He thinks of going on with life unharmed, unnatural, as if nothing had happened. He thinks of his smile widening and the horrors within him let loose on the world. The woman. The darkness at the edges of science. The blackness in him which people like Peter brought out, mocked, made happen. The feelings in him which were not right. The work he had wrought because of them.
He pictures an end, and finds comfort there.
Everyone, everywhere dies. If you’re good and real, and not a thing from outside the world, you eventually end. That finality makes Henry Briggs feel somber and happy and warm. It is the feeling he has been seeking his entire life. The feeling of certainty.
The revolver tastes like smoke, and then like nothing at all.
Punching
By Dennis Detwiller, © 2011
The Vega crawls up the drive to the house in the dark, and the driver, Henry Briggs, leans forward over the wheel to consider the house as he cruises past it. He pulls in next to the other cars — a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a Rolls — and gets out. In the row of darkened cars his Vega looks out of place. It’s even parked unevenly, while the others are in a perfect row. He tries to make a joke out of this in his mind, but finds with some bitterness that he can’t.
He stops once, on his way from the cars, and finds himself looking on a perfect, seamless, manicured lawn which stretches out into a dark copse of trees. He wishes he didn’t feel impressed, but he does. The house has changed, and in that change has only become better than it was.
Briggs is a big, older man. Someone who once might have been a boxer. His features look like they had been set to drift by one too many hard punches. But the eyes above his ruined nose are small and clever. He’s in a suit, the one he wears to work on Wednesdays, that looks two steps too low for this social strata. He looks as uncomfortable as he is. He straightens his tie and crosses the drive to the house.
It’s a big Newport house. Bleached wood, big windows, dozens of rooms, manicured garden, crushed gravel drive. It is as far from the place that Briggs lives, or exists, as is possible.
It is the end of summer, 1964.
∆
He opens the door to the sound of a hundred voices. The house is full of people, all his age, walking, talking, eating, drinking. A black man sits at a Baby Grand piano playing music twenty years out of date.
A paper banner hangs over the gable windows in the back, covering the edge of the high ceiling. It reads “WELCOME CLASS OF ’44”.
Briggs walks to the bar and orders a double gin and tonic, and the bartender, sensing an out-of-place soul, pours generously. Briggs stands at the bar, over the bar, really, watching the crowd, sipping the drink.
By 1944 it was over. The year 1943 was when his life was ruined, and that thought, he thinks, is just as useless as any other, even though it is true. He drinks the drink.
∆
Briggs has killed many people. Too many to count, really. He lost count by 1944. By 1944, when he was in Italy, it was already too late, and he hasn’t really tried to puzzle it out since then. The last killing was two weeks ago. A woman who was twenty-six years old by her passport. He doesn’t feel bad about it.
Something was in her, using her, something from outside. He put a bullet through her face and she launched herself at him, struggling and cackling black laughter while ooze that looked like butter gone over poured out of the hole through her head. She wrestled like she was twice her size. She was so strong Briggs barely had time to pin her arms down with his legs and bludgeon her — it — to death with a heavy bronze lamp.
Then he burned the building to the ground.
Killing wasn’t all that bad when you learned what was really going on. Death was a rule of the world, everyone knew that. It was how systems renewed themselves. It was beautiful, in a way. Killing these other things, though — these other things didn’t die on their own. Something in reality had slipped a spoke and they ran on and on. It was up to the group to punch their ticket. He had done many such things for the group since 1943. Since any semblance of normal life had ended.
No one knew what the things were, really. He had heard some in the group go on and on about Elder Ones and cycles and elliptical orbits of dead stars that ruined the world every 900 million years. He’d seen reports on time gates and ray guns and things that, if they slipped past the net the group had raised, could destabilize the whole world.
Once, he saw something huge and gelatinous and covered in a thousand eyes crawl up from a hand-carved pit in Peru, struggle over the ledge, and consume a tied-up goat with the avidity of a spider feeding on a fly.
That was okay. There were worse things, really.
∆
When he sees Pete Martin, his mind drifts back. He can’t help it. He’s like a goddamn school girl. Martin, his friend. The man he most admired. The guy he had followed around like an idiot.
The man who introduced him to Commander Cook.
Well, indirectly.
Martin looks like what he is. Rich. He drifts through the crowd as if on rollers, a drink filled near to spilling in one large, soft hand. Martin is tall and thin and regal. His face has dark rings under the eyes, but they almost look like makeup. This is a man who would have to puzzle out how, exactly, to use a shovel. To drive a car. To do anything. Things were, are, done for him.
It has always been that way. These were the rules Briggs grew up with. The rich were the rich, the poor were the poor. When a crossover occurred, is was due to luck, skill, or some indefinable quality.
Briggs had all three.
When he was eighteen years old, he had been stupid and naive and young enough to believe that made him special.
∆
After 1941, Harvard was a ghost ship. Classes were shells of what they once had been. Hallways abandoned. Dorms silent. But Briggs was eager. He had worked delivering ice for nine summers to get here. He had cracked the books and had spun up his gift with languages into something valuable. People had noticed.
He didn’t look the sort that could translate Bing Crosby into Greek, but he was. His father had it, he had it. He could hear something once and repeat it perfectly. His dad called it the magic ear. But Briggs had something more than that catgut salesman ever had—he had a hunger for something more than a two-room walkup in Mercator. He was more than a man who smiled and looked down when someone yelled at him over a ten cent shortage. He was a person.
He wanted to be important.
The boxing helped. The college needed boxers. Or at least they had in September 1941, the year he started in Linguistics. He never even laced up, not once, for the school; there was no one to box. Didn’t matter. He didn’t like fighting, he was just good at it, and only then because of his size and reach. There was no real skill he could discern in beating another man senseless.
The school was abandoned. The war had siphoned nearly everyone away. Those who remained were scrawny, sickly, or had something obviously wrong with their anatomy.
Briggs and Martin stood out. Briggs, of course, was in his prime. Huge and imposing and dangerous-looking. Martin looked normal for Harvard. Young and rich and content, with a Cheshire smile on his face all the time like he was in on the big secret.
No one had called Briggs up. There was no letter, no draft notice, and he would be damned if he would volunteer after what he did to get here. If they came for him, that was one thing. If not, he’d get his damn degree. He could give a fuck about the war. He had his own war.
It had been that way since he returned to class from the 1941 Christmas break. The break was dire. Cousins and uncles and friends and others talking about joining up. About reporting in. About turning up for the Navy, because that was the safest, or the Army, because it would all be over before it even started, or the Army Air Corps because, hell, then you got to fly. Even then, before Guadalcanal, no one wanted to join the Marines.
Briggs had nodded and smiled and excused himself, and when the time came he slunk back to Harvard and kept to his books and kept his head down and tried not to talk to anyone outside the rarified life of languages. He half expected a letter any day, a plain letter typed by some fat woman in an office in Washington, calling him to line up and be shot.
It never came. Instead, one day he looked up in Hieratic and Pre-Hieratic and saw Martin sitting there in a row of empty seats, watching him. Peter Martin. Smiling.
∆
Martin was part of the club. If you had to ask which club, you would never know. The two struck up an unlikely friendship over the fall of 1942, back before Briggs knew what Martin was really thinking. Briggs, for his part, didn’t care.
He simply wanted in the club, so of course he never spoke about it. The club made men. It manufactured leaders, presidents, generals. It created greatness from nothing and flung it out into the world.
“You can’t understand what it’s like in Newport,” Martin would say over deviled eggs and drinks at the Box, and Briggs knew he was right and hated that feeling. He couldn’t know what it was like to be secure in his own skin, to be waited on, to feel the pull of others as they desperately tried to get your attention.
Briggs believed Martin saw him as a project, as a possible future member of the club, which, like the university, had emptied. It still held its rites, but with only a fraction of the membership. No one had been punched — given entry to the club — since the war started. There were rumblings that this famine of membership would not last.
Briggs made Martin his project. The lonely rich kid would become his friend. And in time, it happened. For reasons which would become clear later.
“You’re right, I can’t understand it. So show me,” Briggs said. That summer, Martin did.
∆
Peter’s father was Edgar Martin, an ex-Navy man who had inherited something terribly important, although no indication of it could be detected in their house on Nantucket.
The old man looked like someone had smashed his head down between his shoulder blades with a shovel at some distant point in the past. When he turned to face someone, his whole body swiveled at the waist. His eyes were large and liquid behind thick glasses held with solder in a gaudy gold-wired frame. It was his only real point of extravagance, besides his family.
Even in the summer of 1942 on the island, Mr. Martin wore the outfit of a wealthy bookkeeper, with a full wool waistcoat and all. He had warmed to Henry Briggs after bombarding him with a bevy of questions which seemed designed to embarrass or confuse him. They had done neither. Briggs had answered honestly while Peter looked on with amusement, perched on the edge of an ancient, weather-wrecked wood chair in chinos and sandals.
The test, whatever it was, had been passed. Edgar Martin now called him Henry, and was candid with him in a way he never seemed to be with his own son. Briggs was certain he was getting somewhere.
Still, he had no idea where.
The summer dragged on and as the world burned, Henry read, slept, ate and slowly changed color, plotting to find his place in a future where people would look to him and not away.
∆
The night in August when he ran into Edgar Martin in the rambling house was the first indication that he should have been paying more attention.
“You seem like a good boy, Henry, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” Edgar said, holding a glass of milk beaded with moisture, looking out a window on a black beach.
“Sir?” Henry said, pulling the robe tighter.
“Martin hasn’t tried — hasn’t done anything strange? That you would think strange?”
The question fell on the ground and silence followed it.
“No,” Briggs finally replied, though he had no idea what they were talking about.
“Good. Good. I think you might be a good influence on him. Try and keep him out of trouble.”
Briggs went back upstairs and didn’t think about that conversation again until after it all fell apart.
∆
Someone is talking about LBJ again, and Briggs looks up from his third glass to find Martin staring at him, just as they had met, eye-to-eye, for the first time in 1941. Briggs widens his smirk into a smile, one that feels completely fake, and waves. Martin excuses himself from the beautiful woman who is speaking at him and walks over.
“Henry! How the heck are you, man?” Martin says, smiling, hand extended.
Briggs stands from the stool, wipes his right hand on his trousers, grab what seems to be a handkerchief from his jacket with his other hand and turns. He shakes hands with Martin and glances around the room. No one sees the .38.
The first bullet catches Martin in the cheek, leaving a pock-mark the size of a cigarette burn, and the smile — that contented smile — hardens into a thin-lipped grimace as the powder-flash burns his face. Something red, wet and gelatinous launches itself from the back of Martin’s head, landing on the ground like a dishful of water flung out the back door.
Martin falls forward, collapsing in a heap like a marionette with its strings clipped, folding in an unnatural position. Briggs empties the gun into Martin’s slumped body, four more rounds at close range in his neck and back.
Martin bounces on the ground with each hit, convulsing. Then he slowly slides to the right and rolls over, covered in black and red viscera and blood. His blue eyes are tinged with yellow. Peter Martin, whatever was Peter Martin, is gone.
When Briggs looks up, his ears ringing, the room is empty, like a magic trick. He sits back down and sips ice water.
∆
In 1943, Briggs felt he was close. They had skirted the basics of the club; how one was punched, how one might be admitted. Martin talked about it now, though never by name. He talked and talked about how Henry might fit in, how others like him had gained membership before. He told stories of where they ended up, the glorious achievements of those who were punched.
Henry was so excited, he didn’t even pull away when Martin kissed him, suddenly, for the first time in the darkened hallway at Widener Library.
From there things moved fast.
Henry Briggs hadn’t been certain of the limits of what he might do to escape his old life. The spring and summer of 1943 proved that if there were any limits, sleeping with Peter Martin was not one of them. He never considered whether or not it was something he really wanted. At the time, it just seemed to happen.
∆
It failed as you might imagine, suddenly. At the end the affair tumbled in slow motion, like a car wreck played back at 1/8 speed. Bodies, glass and metal tumbling, some crushed, some thrown free.
When Henry staggered to his feet again, he had been dismissed from Harvard. Peter disappeared into the monied escapes his family had prepared for him. Henry’s hopes for school, for the group, vanished like a fog. He was left a survivor the wreck of his life, wandering.
It was three months later, and he was hauling ice again, when Edgar Martin’s car pulled up. When the door opened for Briggs, he got in without a word being exchanged.
∆
“My son is ill,” Edgar said. “We have known this for a long time.”
Henry said nothing.
“I would appreciate if nothing was said of this. And you, Henry, I have kept my eye out for you, too.”
Henry looked up.
“There is a man who has been watching you, a man who has interest in the languages you know. A man I once worked with. A man from the government.” Edgar considered the buildings as they rolled past. “Would you like to meet him?”
Henry said nothing.
They kept driving.
Commander Cook sat in the darkened library of an old house, waiting outside town with a fat folder full of horrors to snap Henry out of his life forever.
∆
And now he is here, in 1964, being shouted at through a bullhorn by police.
Henry Briggs snaps the revolver open, dumps the shells, and reloads with blunt fingers. One round, two rounds, three rounds, four. He has no idea what might happen when he closes the cylinder. But it strikes him now, the humor of it.
The cylinder clicks shut. He brings the gun up.
He pictures the bullet entering his head and failing at its purpose. He thinks of going on with life unharmed, unnatural, as if nothing had happened. He thinks of his smile widening and the horrors within him let loose on the world. The woman. The darkness at the edges of science. The blackness in him which people like Peter brought out, mocked, made happen. The feelings in him which were not right. The work he had wrought because of them.
He pictures an end, and finds comfort there.
Everyone, everywhere dies. If you’re good and real, and not a thing from outside the world, you eventually end. That finality makes Henry Briggs feel somber and happy and warm. It is the feeling he has been seeking his entire life. The feeling of certainty.
The revolver tastes like smoke, and then like nothing at all.
Si el proyecto Kickstarter tiene éxito, se incluirán objetivos adicionales: nuevas historias de Adam Scott Glancy, Greg Stolze y otros autores. Estos pueden convertirse en su propia antología. También se podrían producir audirelatos de las historias de Failed Anatomies
