Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

The night remained preternaturally quiet there on the edge of the highway, absent the burr of distant engines or blatting horns, or the stark sweep of rushing headlights. The world had descended into a primeval well while she’d been partying in their motel room; it had slipped backward and now the desert truly was an ancient and haunted place. What else would shamble from the wastes of rock and scrub and the far off dunes?

She finished the third cigarette and stuffed the pack in her jeans pocket, and with a great act of will sidled the way she’d come; not turning her back, oh no, simply crabbing sideways, hips brushing doorknobs as she went. The tortoise remained in place, immobile as a boulder. The cosmic black tar began eating a few handfuls of stars here and there, like peanuts.

Once at what she prayed was a safe distance, she moved faster, counting doors, terrified of tripping in the dark, of sprawling on her face, and thus helpless, hearing the sibilant shift and crunch of a massive body sliding across gravel. But she made it to the room without occurrence and locked the door and pressed against it, sobbing and blubbering with exhaustion.

He lay facedown in the middle of the crummy bed, his naked body a pale gray smear in the gloom. She went to him and shook him. He raised his head at a drunken pitch and mumbled incoherencies. He didn’t react to her frantic account of the giant tortoise, her speculation that it might be even now bearing down upon them for a late night snack, that the world might be coming to an end.

—Goddamn it, wake up! she said and smacked his shoulder, hard. Then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw tears on his cheeks, the unnatural luster of his eyes. Not tears; sweat poured from him, smoked from him, it saturated the sheets until they resembled a sloughed cocoon. The muscles of his shoulder flexed and bunched in agonized knots beneath her hand.

—There’s been an incident, he whispered.

She wrapped her arms around her knees and bit her thumb and began to rock ever so slightly. —Baby, I just saw a goddamned turtle the size of a car in the parking lot. What incident are you talking about?

—It wasn’t a water stain. You were right. It’s a worm, like a kind that lived in the Paleozoic. The worm slithered off the wall when you left, made a beeline right over here…. He pushed his face into the sheets and uttered a bark. —Look at the wall.

She looked at the wall. The ominous shadow was gone, melted away, if it had ever been. —What happened? she said.

—The worm crawled up my ass and there it waits. It’s gonna rule the world.

She didn’t know what to say. She cried softly, and bit her thumb, and rocked.

—I’m high, he said. His entire body relaxed and he began to snore.

—Oh, you jerk, she said and cried shamelessly, this time in relief. No more pills with tequila chasers for her. She wiped her nose and curled into a ball against his clammy flank and fell unconscious as if she’d been chloroformed.

When she awakened it was still very dark. They lay spine to spine, her leg draped over his, her arm trailing over the edge and near the carpet. His body twitched against hers the way a person does when they dream of running, flying, being pursued through vast, sunless spaces. She closed her eyes.

He shuddered.

Something hit the floor on the opposite side of the bed with a fleshy thud. Her breath caught and her eyes bulged as she listened to the object slowly roll across the floorboards in a bumpy, lopsided fashion. This was a purposeful, animated movement that bristled every hair on her body. She reached over her shoulder and gripped his arm.

—Psst! Honey! It was like shaking a corpse.

Quietly, muffled by the mattresses, someone under the bed began to laugh.

Moth flutters against the billowing curtains—white on white—and Helen knows it’s there only because of the sound its wings make, quick little beats, dry and rustling. Helen imagines the moth scream in a silent high pitch.

Helen wants to get up and untangle the little wings carefully, avoiding the powdery scales, but she cannot let her feet touch the floor. She imagines the cool wide boards, polished to a smooth shine, so good to slide across in her white socks she has to change every day now—but that’s for daytime, when monsters are asleep and sated, and retreat under the floorboards and behind the wallpaper covered in deceitfully bright flowers. All monsters sleep behind the flowers, in the narrow interstices between the wallpaper and the drywall, under the nodding shadows of printed daisies and poppies.

But at night they wait for Helen, and she does not dare to set foot on the smooth floor. The moth flutters, and Helen digs herself deeper under the covers.

Helen has to go to the bathroom. The monster senses her restless shifting and breathes heavily, moving closer to the edge, its claws scrabbling on the wood of the floorboards. Helen can hear the wet gurgling of its saliva and phlegm, and shivers. She will wet her bed again tonight.

Helen’s new mom, Janis, listens to the sounds upstairs. The circle of yellow light from the lamp clings to the shaggy rug Janis wants removed but never gets around to.

Her husband Tom follows her gaze with his own and smiles sheepishly.

“How long do you think until she learns English?”

Tom shrugs. “Children pick up languages pretty fast.”

“But she’s… older.” Janis says. There is carefully hidden disappointment in her voice. She tries to love Helen; most of all, she tries not to regret her decision to adopt her. She did not want to wait for a younger child to become available, not in that horrid hotel with frozen pipes and non-flushing toilet, not in Siberia, where snow covered the ground in October. She grabbed Helen and ran back to the semblance of civilization in Moscow and then back to New Jersey—much like one would grab a sweater one did not particularly like, just to not spend another hour in a mall. She now regretted her panic, she regretted—even though she would never admit it to herself—bringing back Helen and not someone else. She is older, and like so many orphanage kids, she has developed an attachment disorder, or so her psychiatrist said.

She is a pretty child though, Janis consoles herself. Thin and blond, with dark blue eyes that have a habit of staring at any adult with thoughtful intensity, as if sizing them up for parental roles. But everyone said how pretty she was. Janis sighs and returns to her reading. It’s a parenting book, something she never thought she would be reading.

There’s rustling upstairs, and both Janis and Tom look up, as if expecting to be able to see through the vaulted ceiling.

“Should we check on her?” Janis says.

Tom shakes his head. “She’s old enough to sleep by herself.”

Janis remembers the orphanage—ten beds to a room. Helen is not used to being by herself.

“She better not wet her bed again,” Tom says.

Janis nods. The book is not helping.

Helen thinks back to the day when the monsters first appeared. She had to go to the bathroom, and she felt (or imagined) a quick touch of hot breath when her feet touched the cold linoleum tiles of the orphanage floor. She listened to the even breathing of eight other girls—one had been recently adopted, the youngest, who went home with her new mom and dad. There were no monsters and no hidden breathing, just a general unfairness of the situation: the longer one waited for the parents to show up, the smaller one’s chances grew.