From the Low 200s

by Brian Downes

“They really dropped this place right into the desert.” Ashwood said, subsequent to a long jelly-boned groan after lowering herself into the hot tub.

“It’s great at night!” Palmer told his wife. “Don’t you think it’s great at night?”

“It is. Just look at that view.” Her wrist limp with exhaustion, Ashwood clinked her wineglass against his.

Palmer and Ashwood Peers’ new backyard had a three-foot vinyl fence in white going all the way around it. Outside the fence was the desert. Inside the fence there was the desert, too. Sand, and gravel stone. Spiky plants, and a cactus that was nearly as tall as Palmer was.

He and his wife had said, if we’re going to move to Arizona, let’s go all the way. Why force an Ohio lawn into an ecosystem that hates it? Live in the desert? Live in the desert.

Sonora Trails Homes was definitely in the desert. New homes from the low 200s, scooped right out of the sand forty minutes southwest of downtown Phoenix. All the units in the development had these same natural backyards; Palmer, after a minute or two of getting used to it, had loved it enthusiastically. From the hot tub he and Ashwood could admire their cactus, and a view past the fence that included no man-made thing whatsoever for as far as the eye could see. It was scrub plants, and rock that glowed like bone in the early morning and at noon. Their exterminator sprayed for scorpions. Heat ripples hid the far hills. “Oh, there’s an Apache reservation out there,” the woman from the front office had said. “And an army missile range. But you won’t ever see them!”

Today they had moved in, and tonight was the first night that Palmer had seen the yard under the stars.

“Jesus Christ…it’s all so big,” he said, staring up.

“Jesus Christ…it’s all very big.” Ashwood sounded dull and low-powered. It had been a long day of dollying boxes around, the first three hours of it spent without air conditioning because of some confusion regarding the fuse box and a switch on the outdoor unit.

“Well, we’re here now,” Palmer tried to reinforce her tranquility.

“We have to unpack,” she mourned.

“Tyler loves her room,” Palmer said.

“She really likes those big windows,” Ashwood nodded. “Tomorrow, she starts school.”

“She’ll make friends,” Palmer said without thinking. Ashwood drank her wine. Palmer drank his.

“I could just boil myself to death in here,” Ashwood remarked.

“This was the bottom of a giant ocean,” Palmer said, talking about a million years ago. “We’re down with the spiny things at the bottom of an ocean. Crawling right through our yard.”

“Can we spray for them, too?”

Palmer took Tyler to school the next morning. The D’Martine School had no urge to live in the desert. It’s well-watered lawns and pine trees looked like a postcard of New England. The people who worked in the admissions office had all pronounced the school’s name “Dee Martin”.

The buildings were 1980s red brick boxes with skylights in their shingled roofs. Tyler did not hold his hand as they walked onto the campus. She was in sixth grade and anxiously awaiting her menarche; she tried to imply with the gap between them that she didn’t have anything to do with the late-thirties man in khakis and sky blue shirt with the tail out who coincidentally was walking behind her.

Tyler also had an exasperating tendency to dress like a miniature hooker. Pre-teen rebellion. Palmer looked her up and down from behind and said, “You look nice in the school dress code, honey.”

“Yeah,” Tyler swung her serrated sarcasm without turning around. “They let us wear slacks. Wow.”

Palmer grinned.

“Maybe the boys get to wear makeup,” Tyler grumbled.

Palmer wanted to meet Tyler’s homeroom teacher before classes started. They had a room number in Palmer’s PDA, and a name: Ms Quine. They were twenty minutes early. There was nothing in the halls of the D’Martine Academy, but air conditioning, and morning light.

Ms Quine’s room was on the ground floor, with the view out the picture window split into three by two pine trunks close enough to touch, if the window could be opened.

“Well…” Palmer said to the woman at the desk, who seemed about to look up. “Well…I haven’t seen many trees, uh, like those in, uh, Arizona.”

The woman at the desk said: “Our campus is special.”

“Hello,” Palmer said.

“We all love it here.” The woman said. She looked up.

“Yeah…it’s great…” Palmer slowly thrust his hands into his pockets.

“You are Mr. Peers.” The woman said.

“I am,” Palmer felt a little confused.

“So this must be Miss Tyler Peers. Welcome to D’Martine. I’m Ms Quine.” The woman stood up, which gave Palmer a sensation as if he himself had stood up too quickly. He laughed abruptly, and Tyler shot him a withering look.

Ms Quine came forward and shook his hand. Her hand felt like a limp tracery of titanium rods in a fine leather glove loaded with syrup, or engine oil.

“You’re not married?” Palmer heard himself say.

“I am Tyler’s homeroom teacher, and her literature teacher, as well. This quarter our subject is American poetry and short fiction of the early 20th century. Robert Frost; T.S. Eliot; Robert Bloch; August Derleth. Flesh and blood is weak and frail, susceptible to nervous shock; while the True Church can never fail, for it is based upon a rock.”

Palmer nodded with his hands deep in his pockets, and then he nodded some more.

“That’s T.S. Eliot, Mr. Peers.” Ms Quine faintly smiled; her lips stretched as if they were trying to conceal as much of her beautifully semi-translucent teeth as they could.

“That sounds great.” Palmer kept on nodding. “Doesn’t that sound great?” He asked his daughter.

“Sounds great,” she prefuncted in the voice she used to indicate, I am the only one here perceptive enough to see how much this sucks.

As he left the school, Palmer was already trying to reassemble Ms Quine’s in his mind’s eye.

Ashwood started her paralegal position at her new firm in Phoenix that same day that Tyler started at D’Martine. Palmer didn’t report to the engineering firm that had hired him for another week, so he drove home from the Academy and started attacking the boxes that were stacked along the walls of the Sonora Trails house. He started with his rolling tool box, where he’d packed the box cutters, the laser level and the drill, the things he’d need to get their other things deployed. The pieces of his workbench were stacked against the garage wall and he wanted to put that back together first. He hit the garage door opener and took a deep breath as dry white desert light rolled in.

His face and hands were quickly slippery with sweat, and the cerulean button-down was sticking to his back. He had a towel under his knees to cushion them as he knelt with the drill, zipping the bench’s connectors into their slots.

“Hello there,” a deep, creaky voice called from out in the light. Palmer looked up, and saw a black man with a fringe of white hair and a pot belly standing in his driveway. He put the drill down.

“Come on into the shade,” Palmer motioned.

“My wife and I are two doors down,” the black man said. “James and Arlene Candle.” He put out a square tough hand and Palmer shook it.

Candle told Palmer that he had retired from the Navy, serving as an engineer on submarines from 1966 to 2001. “I’m a cold warrior in cold storage.”

Palmer invited him inside, telling him he was an engineer with an aerospace manufacturing firm in the city. He poured them both Cokes with ice and opened up the sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the backyard so that he could feel the desert around him. “So, have you seen this D’Martine Academy?” He asked Candle.

“The Dee what?”

“The D’Martine Academy! It’s this great school near here. I just dropped my daughter off this morning.”

“Well, my boys are past school age…”

“Oh, it’s great. You should see it. Really. Beautiful buildings. And I think they’ve got a really good literature department there. Really unique. They’re teaching poetry.”

“I suppose they would,” Candle nodded agreeably.

“Yeah, the teachers I think are going to be excellent.” Palmer was bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Candle started asking him about the Mercury Mariner Palmer had in the driveway, saying he was thinking of buying one.

Palmer said, “It’s so nice to see people who are really committed to education, you know? You want teachers who are really impressive! What? Sure! My wife has an Altima, but it’s good to have a truck around the house.”

Christ, Palmer - stop talking about D’Martine. He doesn’t have kids at home.

Before he left, Candle let him know that his wife was fighting brain cancer, and was often hospitalized. Learning that made Palmer’s scalp tingle, as if he might unscrew the top of his own skull and see white cancers frothing inside.

Once he had his tools in order, and the scorched smell of the desert flowing through the house, he started on assembling the desk in Tyler’s room, so that she would be able to study.

As the weeks passed under the desiccated sky and the stars that rolled through it, the process of the Peers family settling into their new house proceeded very slowly, as if they were a river filling the three bedroom, two bath with their silt. Unpacking seemed to require a toll of energy. Boxes remained stacked.

Ashwood and Palmer spent many evenings in the back yard, while Tyler was in her room. They would lounge in the hot tub, and Palmer would get out and walk around the yard in his bare feet, feeling the water scraped from his skin by the dry night air, and the pebbles underneath his toes. At night, the air could turn cold. They sank into the hot tub up to their collar bones. They would look over the white picket fence at the desert, indistinct under the layer of night.

“Honey! Look!” Palmer pointed one night. “Look! Do you see?”

“What?”

“Look!”

“Coyotes?”

“No! I don’t know what it is! Come here!” He was thrilled by the mystery, and a little afraid. He felt like he should have a hat that buttoned up on one side, and a rifle, but he didn’t have either of those things.

Ashwood climbed out of the hot tub, and he tracked her approach from behind by the sound of the water streaming off her.

They had learned quickly that the desert’s shadows moved. Coyotes trotted. The silhouettes of cacti lengthened and retracted; the blots of clouds raced or rolled or oozed. Vultures skimmed in wide, lightly uncomplaining circles. But what Palmer and Ashwood were seeing now in the night-laden Sonora was none of those things.

The things they saw seemed to roll. They had the gelatinousness of toads, but if they were toads they were huge. The things seemed to crawl. They had the belly-down sinuousness of things that never blinked and were a poison to that which ate them.

Palmer said, “Cooooool…”

“Huh. What are they?” Ashwood asked, standing in her bikini. The lines of her neck and the armature of bones in her shoulder were chiaroscuro in the light that fell inadequately all around in the night.

“They’re really cool!” Palmer cried.

“I can’t tell how far away they are. Can you?”

“Yeah,” Palmer said. “They’re about…uh…”

They stood watching the things as they prowled and jellied across the stones.

Palmer ran into the house and to his daughter’s door. He knocked quickly, then turned the knob. “Tyler! Tyler! I want you to see something!”

He’d thought she was asleep; but instead she was sitting at her desk under the three big windows, with the blinds raised. She was just a black outline with the desk lamp on in front of her, but the lamp also made a reflection out of the windows, and as she turned around to peevishly insist on knowing, “What?”, Palmer saw his daughter’s tumbled hair and twisted neck reproduced three times.

Anyone outside must see her like in a theater, he thought.

“I thought you were sleeping, honey.”

“I’m studying, Dad.”

“Come out in the back yard! Come on!”

She sighed with toleration stretched to the snapping point. As she went passed him she carried a small white booklet in her hand with her thumb thrust in to keep her place.

Palmer’s wife was standing were he had left her. The chilly night raised goose pimples on her arms. Her feet were pointed in toward one another, and her lips were open, showing the two bones that were her front teeth. She looked forlorn now, staring into the Sonora. “I think there are more of them,” she told them.

Tyler stared over the fence, as well, and the things in the indeterminable distance hopped and slipped from one stony table to another.

“God, this is great,” Palmer beamed. What a wonderful world he had found at the bottom of the primordial sea.

Tyler still had her study booklet at the end of one limp wrist. Palmer glanced down at it, and the black on white typeface was legible in the shadowy backyard light.

Azathoth and Others, by Edward Derby.

Palmer’s heart thumped at this connection to the literature teacher with the sensitive eyes, Ms Quine.

Azathoth…and Others.

Azathoth, he thought, trying the name out in his mind, liking the feeling of it, as he had liked the spark of a nine volt battery against his tongue when he’d been an underclassman.

Azathoth.

He stole the book the next night.

Tyler was out Friday evening at the house of a friend from school. Palmer just went into his daughter’s room while his wife wasn’t looking, sifted through a stack of books and notebooks until he found the little volume, and went into the un-air conditioned garage to read it. He sat sweating in the chair at his workbench, the book in his hands, his hands between his knees.

Edward Pickman Derby, Palmer learned from a folded sheet that fell out of the booklet, had been born in Arkham, Massachusetts, in 1891. He’d produced Azathoth And Others by the time he was nineteen, but his creative life drizzled out after that. By 1933 he had murdered his wife, been committed to an insane asylum, and was ultimately shot to death in his cell by his legal guardian, who was afterward suspected as the cause of Derby’s killing his wife. Question for discussion: how does the connection between “mental illness” and creative power operate?

Palmer whispered the dreadful name, “Azathoth,” as he peeled the pages of the booklet apart. It was obvious that they were manufactured from scanned images of a 1920s original. “Azathoth,” he said, reading the word from the first line of the first poem.

Azathoth…Azathoth…Azathoth. Great Cthulhu is his priest from beneath the aeon-shadowed tides, when the stars are right…and the Old Ones are dancing to the pipes…

He dashed over to the garage door opener, wanting to see the night, wanting to breath some air. The door ground open, revealing the spiky desert plants, the taupe and khaki houses with white trim and red-tiled roofs across the asphalt lane, the avenue of stars overhead, a shrieking liftoff that extended forever above them; and a form that he recognized instantly, like the shape of his own cradle, strolling on the opposite side of the street. He went out to her. She stood there waiting for him. Her giant brown eyes, those overdesigned instruments, were fist-holes of shadow when the light was at her back.

“Ms Quine, we’ve met once before,” he said, his hands thrust deeply into his pockets.

“Mr. Palmer Peers…” she said, very slowly, as if sentences of meaning could be delivered - were being delivered - in the syllables of his name. She said his name and nothing else, and he understood that he had her full and sincere attention, as much as if he were penetrating her. Having her attention, he wanted to luxuriate in it - he wanted to concentrate on the sensation of having the reins. “I trust that Tyler is applying herself to the subject of literature.”

“That is to be expected,” Ms Quine said coolly. “Literature is a subject not to apply to, but to submit to. The true student allows themselves to be - permeated.” Each syllable formed by her mouth was an urgent message in a code that carried more information than any mundane language ever had. In her languid hand she held a leash.

“Is that a dog?” Palmer smiled, and twisted his fists in his pockets.

“---,” she said. The creature at the end of the leash flopped and twisted.

Palmer noticed two other men out on the night-shrouded sidewalk with them. Both of them were fat around the middle, short-sleeved button-downs tucked into their belted shorts, and they stared at Palmer from some yards off, their faces communicating an anxiety at his presence, as if he was going to lick up all the gravy that had been meant for them.

One of the men was James Candle, the retired submariner. The other was someone who Palmer had not met, named Sam Cambridge. Ashwood had pointed him out on the street one day, saying: “I met his wife. She says he’s got cancer.”

Candle and Cambridge seemed to want to come forward. Their feet rippled, wanting to come forward.

Ms Quine looked at them. She made a gesture with the hand that held the leash, and Cambridge and Candle bowed to her, and with a last, somewhat less anxious glance at Palmer, went quickly away.

“I read Azathoth and Others,” Palmer ventured, wanting her to be proud of him.

Then she talked to him about poetry in the arid air of the night. The windows of the subdivision glowed down on them, and as she lectured, Palmer felt things shifting inside him. Globules transmigrating, revealing his solid body as only a sack of organs.

While he was outside with the literature teacher he had felt excited, and happy. But within twenty-four hours the memory of the conversation had turned to terror, and Palmer couldn’t bear to think of what had panted at the end of the leash. He couldn’t bear to think of how he had panted, either.

The next day as he drove into the subdivision under the slanting evening sun, he kept his eyes wide open for Ms Quine, or her admirers. But he didn’t see any of them. He saw a neighbor he had not yet met raking the sand in his front yard.

Things seemed to be all right at home, but his wife and daughter did not talk, except in heaved out, perfunctory phrases. Human communication seemed to have become a heart-sapping chore. They were all speaking in grunts and gestures. At dinner, Tyler pantomimed shaking out salt in order to get her mother to hand the salt to her. Palmer felt a dread throughout the evening like a foot pressing on his stomach. His mind rebelled against that which he was afraid of; his vision blurred. His thinking was sluggish. He knew he had made a terrible mistake.

As his daughter was leaving the living room for her bed, he roused himself to action. He thrust his hand out at her retreating back. “Give me Azathoth And Others.”

She turned and looked at him. “What?” She was deeply irritated by his insensibility.

“Come on, give me that book.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

He couldn’t tolerate the effort of inventing a lie. “Burn it. Or put it in the shredder.”

“No.” She shook her twelve year-old head contemptuously. “It’s a school book, Dad.”

“Come here. Come here. Come here.” But Tyler closed her door behind her.

“All right! God damn it! All right!” Palmer stormed out the front door, barely conscious of his wife staring at him as if he was some kind of idiot jerking off on a bus stop bench.

He went straight to the Candle residence, and started banging on the door. “Candle!” He shouted for the old Navy engineer. “Candle! Candle, come out! Come out here, God damn it…! You know what I want, Candle, so stop pretending!”

He could see lights on inside. But Candle did not come to the door. There was no sound from the neighborhood at all. His shouts and his obscenities fell onto the desert floor without effect.

He acted like he didn’t know D’Martine, Palmer thought, looking up at the lights in Candle’s windows. But the son of a bitch knew Quine.

“Candle!” He bellowed. “You can tell Cambridge I know what’s going on!”

No one answered him.

Through the strangely dead night, he walked back to his own house, which still looked brand new after only a few weeks of occupation. Boiling with a subcutaneous anger he went in past the boxes still stacked against the living room wall. He intended to have an unsmiling conversation with his wife about their daughter. Not seeing Ashwood in the living room, not seeing her in the kitchen or the still and still-unused dining room, he opened the door to the master bedroom.

Ashwood was in the bed, covered by a single layer of white cotton sheet. Her eyes were closed, but her sleep looked troubled - the tip of her tongue protruded through her parted lips. A stale gloss of sweat was on her face. And a thing crouched over her body in the bed; it was over this hideous bulk that the white bed sheet dangled, so that only its edges slipped against the bedcover.

Palmer stood in the doorway agape. His nerves had all gone dead. His anger was replaced with a weight like hardened grease. And when a head repulsively unlike an amphibian’s protruded - along with the appendage that already vaguely articulated from under one edge of the draped sheet - when that head pushed itself out, and looked at him, and visibly changed shape, Palmer’s single thought was to run and grab his daughter.

But there was another one of the things in his daughter’s bed, as well.

Senseless for any better course, he tore through the pristine house in the direction from where he had just come. But the giant frog-like thing that had been in with his wife now squatted in the kitchen. Palmer skidded short of falling on top of it. It’s mass seemed to be made up of something normally like intestines, if intestines had normally been on the outside…and endowed with individual will. It looked at Palmer with its detestable yellow green eyes, and seemed about to speak.

BRRRRRR-RRRR-AAAA-GNNGG.

One terrible, monotonous, extended note shattered every window in the house. An implosion of glass that scattered shards across the tile floors gritty with the tracked in Sonora sand. Palmer knew then, as his fingers closed around the fire extinguisher on top of the refrigerator, that this was one of the desert shadows that he and Ashwood had watched with such naïve delight.

Things had shifted inside him unbearably at the sound of that hideous pipe, globules squirming inside the bag of his body. Blood was gushing wetly from his ears.

He slammed the red fire extinguisher into one of the piper’s awful imbecilic eyes. The eye bulged inward.

BRRRRRR-RRRR-AAAA-GNNGG.

Shards of glass danced along the floors.

Palmer had one instant to see the frog-headed thing that split his abdomen vertically, leaving him flabby and flapping like the plastic curtain on a meat packing plant. In the last second of the pipe-note, it had come bursting OUT.

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