Terminal Park by Gary J. Shipley

Author:Gary J. Shipley [Shipley, Gary J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apocalypse Party
Published: 2020-11-09T06:00:00+00:00

The AC was failing, working only in short blasts and then emitting only feeble exhalations insufficiently cooled. But even in the 90-degree-plus heat, with the air around the vents no better than tepid, Kaal’s skin was raised on every follicle, his body wracked by a series of micro-convulsions indicative of some other lesser temperature. He sat in his chair waiting for the green flashes to clear.

NB was silent. Had they witnessed the same thing? Kaal could hear his strained breathing above the noise of the city: its traffic, the birds spiralling upwards in a tumult, the teenagers screaming in the park. As it became increasingly laboured he imagined him engaged in some act of extreme and agonizing exertion, everything from weighted chin-ups to chopping off a limb. There was an increasing need to see what NB was doing, what state he was in. And with his agitation approaching panic, a face came into frame, a face he didn’t immediately recognize as being that of NB, a face that ran through him like an electrical charge, at which point there was no longer any doubt that what Kaal had seen had been more than some hallucinatory quirk of light, more than the imaginings of a man sequestered in a tower waiting for a giant human monster the size of Mumbai to eat him alive; for whatever he’d seen, this face had seen it too, this face that while sharing the approximate arrangement of NB’s was now mutated into some piteous and corrupted likeness, identity having degraded so rapidly as to find itself transformed into the shakiest of resemblances. And yet it was him. There was still enough left for Kaal to be fairly certain of a noxious continuity between the man on the screen and the man there some few minutes before. In fact, his looking so unlike himself, retaining only those structural relations vital to this comparative recognition, made it somehow more feasible that it was actually him, the distortion to his features correlating perfectly in some unmeasurable sense with what had happened moments earlier.

As he looked at NB’s ravaged countenance he wondered if his own face had undergone similar modifications, or whether as his touching seemed to confirm, nothing significant had changed.

***

Most of the original fluid in the barrels had been displaced, with any that remained filling only the most negligible of spaces left between and inside the more recent items of ballast that had gradually supplanted it. Like vinegar in a pickling jar now, only it didn’t preserve but instead turned increasingly murky and toxic, the objects enveloped there leaching into it, the water darkening, thickening, becoming rancid. Even with the lids of the barrels replaced the smell of the contents escaped, drifting through and around the house where it marbled the air with its unpleasant sweetness.

The barrels and the accumulating ballast sequestered elsewhere about the house started to attract flies. More and more the visitors were under the impression that Parker was replicating the imagined stench of the exhumed mother, or of Ed Gein’s exotic tastes in home furnishings.

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