Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Read online

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’d think we would have quit the portal entirely after the robot fog incident, but then you’re probably mistaking us for intelligent people. Instead we went back now and again—it was the only thing we could all agree to do together. Sometimes I went by myself, too. I suspect Gretchen was doing the same—she’d be missing for a couple of hours then would come back flushed and covered with burrs, claiming to have been down on the recreation path, jogging. I don’t think the kids went alone—but then where did Chester get that weird knife?

  In any event, what we saw in there became increasingly disturbing. Crowds of people with no faces, a world where the ground itself seemed to be alive, heaving and sweating. We generally wouldn’t spend more than a few minutes wherever we ended up. The portal, in its decline into senility, seemed to have developed an independent streak, a mind of its own. It was . . . giving us things. Things it thought we wanted. It showed us a world that was almost all noise and confusion and flashing red light, with a soundtrack of something you could hardly call music made by something you maybe could mistake for guitars. Only Luann had a good time in that one. There was Chester’s world, the one that wheeled around us in pixelated, rainbow 3-D, where every big-eyed armored creature exploded into fountains of glittering blood and coins, and the one that looked like ours, except thinner, everything thinner, the buildings and people and trucks and cars, and from the expression of horror on Gretchen’s face, I could tell where that one was coming from. And there was the one place where all the creatures great and small appeared to have the red hair, thick ankles, and perky little boobs of the new administrative assistant at my office. Gretchen didn’t talk to me for days after that, but it certainly did put me off the new assistant.

  And so before the summer was over, we gave up. The kids were too busy indulging their new selves and quit playing make-believe out in the woods. And Gretchen and I were lost in our private worlds of self-disgust and conjugal disharmony. By Christmas we’d forgotten about the portal, and the clearing began to fill in. We did what people do: we heaved our grim corporeal selves through life.

  I checked back there a couple of times over the next few years—you know, just to see if everything looked all right. Needless to say, last time I checked, it didn’t—the humming was getting pretty loud, and the shimmering oval was all lopsided, with a sort of hernia in the lower left corner, which was actually drooping far enough to touch the ground. When I poked a stick through the opening, there was a pop and a spark and a cloud of smoke, and the portal seemed to emit a kind of hacking cough, followed by the scent of ozone and rot. When I returned to the house and told Gretchen what I’d seen, she didn’t seem to care. And so I decided not to care, either. Like I said before, there were more important things to worry about.

  Just a few weeks ago, though, I started hearing strange noises at night. “Didya hear that?” I’d say out loud, and if I was in bed with Gretchen (as opposed to on the sofa, alone), she would rise up out of half sleep to tell me no, it was just a dream. But it wasn’t. It was a little like a coyote’s yip, but deeper, more elongated. And sometimes there would be a screech of metal on metal, or a kind of random ticking; and if I got up and looked out the window, sometimes I thought I could see a strange glow coming from the woods.

  And now, even in the daytime, there’s a funny odor hanging around the yard. It’s springtime, and Gretchen says it’s just the smell of nature waking up. But I don’t think so. Is springtime supposed to smell like motor oil and dog piss in the morning? To be perfectly honest, I’m beginning to be afraid of what our irresponsibility, our helplessness, has wrought. I mean, we bought this place. We own it, just like we own all our other problems.

  I try to talk to Gretchen about it, but she doesn’t want to hear it. “I’m on a different track right now,” she says. “I can’t be distracted from my healing.” “Healing from what?” I want to know. “My psychic disharmony.” I mean, what can you say to that? Meanwhile, I have no idea where our daughter is half the time, and I haven’t gone up to Chester’s room in three weeks. I can hear him up there, muttering; I can hear the bed squeak as he acts out his violent fantasies; I hear the menacing orchestral strings and explosions and tortured screams that emanate from his favorite games.

  Problems don’t just go away, you know? Problems get bigger and bigger and before you know it they’re bigger than you are, and it’s too late to fix them. Some days, when I’ve gotten a decent night’s sleep and have had a few cups of coffee, I think sure, I’ll just get on the phone, start calling people up and asking for help. A school guidance counselor, a marriage therapist, a pediatrician, a witch or shaman or wizard or physicist or whoever in the hell might know what to do about the portal, or even have the balls to walk down that path and see what’s become of the clearing.

  But on other days, days like today, when I’m too damned tired even to reach for the phone, the only emotion I can summon up is longing, for a time when the world was miraculous, when I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and start living.

  I mean, the magic has to come from some place, right? It’s out there, bestowing itself on somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s kids, somebody else’s life. All I want is to get just a little of it back. Is that so much to ask?

  ERIC PUCNER

  Beautiful Monsters

  Eric Puchner is the author of the story collection Music Through the Floor and the novel Model Home, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and won the California Book Award Silver Medal for best work of fiction. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope: All Story, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the 2014 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2015 he was awarded the $25,000 Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, given annually to writers “of proven excellence in poetry or prose.” He is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

  Like some of the best science-fiction stories, “Beautiful Monsters” begins in strange surroundings, gradually filling in details until the plot crystallizes and an extraordinary experience has occurred. The story was first published in the literary magazine Tin House and was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories.

  The boy is making breakfast for his sister—fried eggs and cheap frozen sausages, furred with ice—when he sees a man eating an apple from the tree outside the window. The boy drops his spatula. It is a gusty morning, sun-sharp and beautiful, and the man’s shirt flags out to one side of him, rippling in the wind. The boy has never seen a grown man in real life, only in books, and the sight is both more and less frightening than he expected. The man picks another apple from high in the tree and devours it in several bites. He is bearded and tall as a shadow, but the weirdest things of all are his hands. They seem huge, grotesque, as clumsy as crabs. The veins on them bulge out, forking around his knuckles. The man plucks some more apples from the tree and sticks them in a knapsack at his feet, ducking his head so that the boy can see a saucer of scalp in the middle of his hair.

  What do you think it wants? his sister whispers, joining him by the stove. She watches the hideous creature strip their tree of fruit; the boy might be out of work soon, and they need the apples themselves. The eggs have begun to scorch at the edges.

  I don’t know. He must have wandered away from the woods.

  I thought they’d be less . . . ugly, his sister says.

  The man’s face is damp, streaked with ash, and it occurs to the boy that he’s been crying. A twig dangles from his beard. The boy does not find the man ugly—he finds him, in fact, mesmerizing—but he does not mention this to his sister, who owns a comic book filled with pictures of handsome fathers, contraband drawings of twinkling, w
ell-dressed men playing baseball with their daughters or throwing them high into the air. There is nothing well-dressed about this man, whose filthy pants—like his shirt—look like they’ve been sewn from deerskin. His bare feet are black with soot. Behind him the parched mountains seethe with smoke, charred by two-week-old wildfires. There have been rumors of encounters in the woods, of firefighters beset by giant, hairy-faced beasts stealing food or tents or sleeping bags, of girls being raped in their beds.

  The man stops picking apples and stares right at the kitchen window, as if he smells the eggs. The boy’s heart trips. The man wipes his mouth on his sleeve, then limps down the driveway and stoops inside the open door of the garage.

  He’s stealing something! the boy’s sister says.

  He barely fits, the boy says.

  Trap him. We can padlock the door.

  The boy goes and gets the .22 from the closet in the hall. He’s never had cause to take it out before—their only intruders are skunks and possums, the occasional raccoon—but he knows exactly how to use it, a flash of certainty in his brain, just as he knows how to use the lawn mower and fix the plumbing and operate the worm-drive saw at work without thinking twice. He builds houses for other boys and girls to live in, it is what he’s always done—he loves the smell of cut pine and sawdust in his nose, the fzzzzdddt of screws buzzing through Sheetrock into wood—and he can’t imagine not doing it, any more than he can imagine leaving this gusty town ringed by mountains. He was born knowing these things, will always know them; they are as instinctive to him as breathing.

  But he has no knowledge of men, only what he’s learned from history books. And the illicit, sentimental fairy tales of his sister’s comic.

  He tells his sister to stay inside and then walks toward the garage, leading with the rifle. The wind swells the trees, and the few dead August leaves crunching under his feet smell like butterscotch. For some reason, perhaps because of the sadness in the man’s face, he is not as scared as he would have imagined. The boy stops inside the shadow of the garage and sees the man hunched behind the lawn mower, bent down so his head doesn’t scrape the rafters. One leg of the man’s pants is rolled up to reveal a bloody gash on his calf. He picks a fuel jug off the shelf and splashes some gasoline on the wound, grimacing. The boy clears his throat, loudly, but the man doesn’t look up.

  Get out of my garage, the boy says.

  The man startles, banging his head on the rafters. He grabs a shovel leaning against the wall and holds it in front of him. The shovel, in his overgrown hands, looks as small as a baseball bat. The boy lifts the .22 up to his eye, so that it’s leveled at the man’s stomach. He tilts the barrel at the man’s face.

  What will you do?

  Shoot you, the boy says.

  The man smiles, dimpling his filthy cheeks. His teeth are as yellow as corn. I’d like to see you try.

  I’d aim right for the apricot. The medulla. You’d die instantly.

  You look like you’re nine, the man mutters.

  The boy doesn’t respond to this. He suspects the man’s disease has infected his brain. Slowly, the man puts down the shovel and ducks out of the garage, plucking cobwebs from his face. In the sunlight, the wound on his leg looks even worse, shreds of skin stuck to it like grass. He reeks of gasoline and smoke and something else, a foul body smell, like the inside of a ski boot.

  I was sterilizing my leg.

  Where do you live? the boy asks.

  In the mountains. The man looks at his gun. Don’t worry, I’m by myself. We split up so we’d be harder to kill.

  Why?

  Things are easier to hunt in a herd.

  No, the boy says. Why did you leave?

  The fire. Burned up everything we were storing for winter. The man squints at the house. Can I trouble you for a spot of water?

  The boy lowers his gun, taking pity on this towering creature that seems to have stepped out of one of his dreams. In the dreams, the men are like beautiful monsters, stickered all over with leaves, roaming through town in the middle of the night. The boy leads the man inside the house, where his sister is still standing at the window. The man looks at her and nods. That someone should have hair growing out of his face appalls her even more than the smell. There’s a grown man in my house, she says to herself, but she cannot reconcile the image this arouses in her brain with the stooped creature she sees limping into the kitchen. She’s often imagined what it would be like to live with a father—a dashing giant, someone who’d buy her presents and whisk her chivalrously from danger, like the brave, mortal fathers she reads about—but this man is as far from these handsome creatures as can be.

  And yet the sight of his sunburned hands, big enough to snap her neck, stirs something inside her, an unreachable itch.

  They have no chairs large enough for him, so the boy puts two side by side. He goes to the sink and returns with a mug of water. The man drinks the water in a single gulp, then immediately asks for another.

  How old are you? the girl says suspiciously.

  The man picks the twig from his beard. Forty-six.

  The girl snorts.

  No, really. I’m aging by the second.

  The girl blinks, amazed. She’s lived for thirty years and can’t imagine what it would be like for her body to mark the time. The man lays the twig on the table, ogling the cantaloupe sitting on the counter. The boy unsheathes a cleaver from the knife block and slices the melon in two, spooning out the pulp before chopping off a generous piece. He puts the orange smile of cantaloupe on a plate. The man devours it without a spoon, holding it like a harmonica.

  Where do you work? the man asks suddenly, gazing out the window at the pickup in the driveway. The toolbox in the bed glitters in the sun.

  Out by Old Harmony, the boy says. We’re building some houses.

  Anything to put your brilliant skills to use, eh?

  Actually, we’re almost finished, the boys says. The girl looks at him: increasingly, the boy and girl are worried about the future. The town has reached its population cap, and rumor is there are no plans to raise it again.

  Don’t worry, the man says, sighing. They’ll just repurpose you. Presto chango.

  How do you know? the girl asks.

  I know about Perennials. You think I’m an ignorant ape? The man shakes his head. Jesus. The things I could teach you in my sleep.

  The girl smirks at her brother. Like what?

  The man opens his mouth as if to speak but then closes it again, staring at the pans hanging over the stove. They’re arranged, like the tail bones of a dinosaur, from large to small. His face seems to droop. I bet you, um, can’t make the sound of a loon.

  What?

  With your hands and mouth? A loon call?

  The boy feels nothing in his brain: an exotic blankness. The feeling frightens him. The man perks up, seeming to recover his spirits. He cups his hands together as if warming them and blows into his thumbs, fluttering one hand like a wing. The noise is perfect and uncanny: the ghostly call of a loon.

  The girl grabs the cleaver from the counter. How did you do that?

  Ha! Experts of the universe! The man smiles, eyes bright with disdain. Come here and I’ll teach you.

  The girl refuses, still brandishing the knife, but the boy swallows his fear and approaches the table. The man shows him how to cup his hands together in a box and then tells him to blow into his knuckles. The boy tries, but no sound comes out. The man laughs. The boy blows until his cheeks hurt, until he’s ready to give up, angry at the whole idea of bird calls and at loons for making them, which only makes the man laugh harder. He pinches the boy’s thumbs together. The boy recoils, so rough and startling is the man’s touch. Trembling, the boy presses his lips to his knuckles again and blows, producing a low airy whistle that surprises him—his chest filling with something he can’t explain, a shy arrogant pleasure, like a blush.

  The boy and girl let the man use their shower. While he’s undressing, they creep outside a
nd take turns at the bathroom window, their hands cupped to the glass, sneaking looks at his strange hairy body and giant shoulders tucked in like a vulture’s and long terrible penis, which shocks them when he turns. The girl is especially shocked by the scrotum. It’s limp and bushy and speckled on one side with veiny bursts. She has read about the ancient way of making babies, has even tried to imagine what it would be like to grow a fetus in her belly, a tiny bean-sized thing blooming into something curled and sac-bound and miraculous. She works as an assistant in a lab where frozen embryos are kept, and she wonders sometimes, staring at the incubators of black-eyed little beings, what it would be like to raise one of them and smoosh him to her breast, like a gorilla does. Sometimes she even feels a pang of loneliness when they’re hatched, encoded with all the knowledge they’ll ever need, sent off to the orphanage to be raised until they’re old enough for treatments. But, of course, the same thing happened to her, and what does she have to feel lonely about?

  Once in a while the girl will peek into her brother’s room and see him getting dressed for work, see his little bobbing string of a penis, vestigial as his appendix, and her mouth will dry up. It lasts only for a second, this feeling, before her brain commands it to stop.