A Tear in the Veil Read online

  Like it’s old hat to him.

  “Flying spider head things that glow and eat little centipede things that glow too off a little girl’s face. A bright white cat with obsidian eyes that can walk through things.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Uh… some glowing see-through growth things on people. Guy with big, all-blue eyes. The worst was this really, really dark thing. Freaky.”

  Rudy turns his head and looks Felix in the eyes. He looks nervous. That’s got you all ears.

  Felix continues, “Human shaped pretty much. Dark doesn’t do it justice, though. Seemed like it absorbed light. And when it moved, it like–”

  “Were you recording?” Rudy asks, interrupting.

  “No.”

  “Damn. Why not?”

  “I wasn’t out there to make home movies. Didn’t seem important. Hell, I didn’t want to see anything at all.”

  “Too bad. Shit… He won’t even tell me about those. Come on.” Rudy stands up.

  Felix hesitates.

  “Wait. Who’s ‘He’? What are you saying?”

  “I met you here to make sure you were cool. You are, so what we’re really doing is going to see a man about some upgrades.”

  The BART car shudders a bit as it cruises quickly through an underground stretch of tunnel heading south.

  Rudy looks around at the other passengers. Casually, of course.

  Apparently satisfied, Rudy opens his backpack and produces his HDV-426. Felix notices some differences immediately.

  It’s subtle enough but there is a slightly glossy pattern or intricate symbol over the solid-state drive housing. There’s a different pattern on the lens. You probably wouldn’t see them at all if not for the lights right above their padded bench seats.

  There are also some foam and plastic parts glued on that make it look different. They look cosmetic. Rudy extends the camera and remote viewfinder to Felix.

  Felix says, “I’ve got a four-two-six.”

  “Not for playback. Yours needs some… accessorizing.”

  Felix takes them. As he puts the viewfinder on, he notices that it also has a pattern on it. “Ready?” Rudy asks.

  “Sure, why not?” Felix says sarcastically.

  Rudy reaches over and presses the play button.

  It’s a succession of raw shots. Some are just quick glimpses out a car or bus window. Others are longer like Rudy was able to really study the subject.

  Most of the shots are of things he’s seen or similar. Spiderflies, slints, burrowpedes, amoeba growths, etc. There are growths he hasn’t seen like translucent tentacles and bulbous sacks which glow and pulse and pump with those strange little internal organs on people’s faces, necks, and backs.

  One bulbous sack wriggles and pulls itself loose from a person’s neck and pumps away through the air like flying jellyfish before attaching to another person’s face down the sidewalk and nestling in. There are also larger flying creatures, which are more fleshy and streamlined and also have many eyes all over their long head regions and curved mouths along those, full of layered flesh kind of like a whale. Thick bunches of thin tentacles trail out their segmented, flower-like rear sections and they slide through the air with quick, controlled whips of those and maneuver with curved bunches of tentacles on their bellies which act like fins. Their general shape and sliding movement reminds Felix of a seal’s even though they share no other similarities and seals aren’t generally see-through. One shot shows one of these creatures surprising a small swarm of spiderflies and whipping its long head back and forth as it slides through the air feeding on them. Because of its translucence, Felix can see that it traps the spiderflies in a sticky substance in its layered mouth then crushes them with repeated waggling jaw force before swallowing the crunchy mush.

  In another shot, a really big, bulbous growth on the upper arm of a woman makes her appear fatter than she already is.

  Another starts with a large bulb over a man’s eye that’s so full of little pumping organs and fluid that his eye is barely visible. When the man turns more toward the camera, Felix can see a group of thick tentacles sprout from behind his ear and disappear into his cheek on that side and come out his mouth when he speaks. After his mouth closes, the tentacles stay there, writhing on his chin. A woman enters the frame and leans into him and they kiss. Felix can see the tentacles squirming around and through her mouth and cheeks.

  Out of all the different shots, three stand out.

  It occurs to Felix that three hours ago every one of these shots would have blown his mind on its own. Reluctant adaptation I guess.

  The first shot is of a homeless man downtown near the bus station. He’s very agitated and he seems to be able to see growths on people around him. He jabs his finger toward the growths on one woman walking down the sidewalk and tries to get others to look. They just look scared or nervous and hurry on their way.

  The wall of a building near him shimmers subtly and shudders then breaks open like horizontal window slats. There is only darkness past the openings. Felix feels his ear tingling and realizes he can just hear a mechanical creak from inside the dark openings. A faintly glowing, sickly green gas or mist belches out of the wall, enveloping the man in its murky clouds. He tries to swat the gas away from his face but his breathing is heavy due to his excited state and after only a few breaths, he relaxes so much that he slouches against the wall next to the openings. When he exhales what’s left of the gas, it comes out thinner and dark blue. He looks drunk or high as he stumbles away down the sidewalk, seemingly oblivious to whatever was bothering him before. The slats close and the wall looks normal again.

  Okaaaaay…

  The second is of the sky on a rare-ish partly cloudy, sunny day. There are dark discolorations passing through the fluffy clouds and open sky. Some float slow enough that they stay in roughly the same area while others cruise smoothly through the air like asteroids in a belt. They’re hardly visible and even though they’re vague, they are definitely different shapes and sizes.

  The third standout is of an intersection in the Mission District. The camera tilts up, framing a low angle shot of the space above the traffic lights and bus wires then pans left as if to follow something moving through the shot in the air… but there’s nothing in sight. Something about that bothers him more than anything else he’s just watched.

  He hits stop on the camera during a shot in Golden Gate Park of a bald, trench coat wearing man in the distance walking through a tree. It’s definitely not normal, but even with all this other stuff that could still just be an optical illusion.

  Felix removes the viewfinder and raises his eyebrows.

  “Wow.”

  Felix hands the camera back to Rudy.

  “That’s just a few shots since I wiped it,” Rudy says.

  “Wiped it?” Felix asks.

  “I take it to the man and he loads it into this big master drive then I wipe it and fill it up again.” “Who is this guy?”

  “He goes by the name Var-height. He’s like a zoologist for this shit.”

  Felix asks, “How did you get hooked up with him?”

  “There was a guy in the FMC ward before you got there. They stuck us together. Like a ‘gutter punk’ or whatever? Smelled like it. Anyway, he told me that he heard there was some guy who knows what’s really going on. Said it was impossible to find him without help. I’m good, but he was right. After I got out and tried the camera thing again, I eventually found him or… probably vice versa, actually.”

  “You sure he’s for real?” Felix asks.

  “As real as any of this.”

  The BART train starts to slow. Signs that read “Colma” flash by outside the train windows.

  Rudy stands, finishes securing his HDV-426 back in his bag, and says, “This is us.”

  “Colma? Does he live in a cemetery?” Felix asks.

  Rudy chuckles and says, “Not quite. Close enough, though.”

  16

  Colma is
a small city south of San Francisco comprised largely of cemeteries segregated by race and/or religion. It’s a legitimate necropolis set aside for that purpose sometime in the 1920s. Felix looked it up one time and was tripped out to learn that there are more dead people there than living. “The city of the silent” is what some people call it, which makes sense if you’re there in certain parts for more than twenty minutes.

  Most of Felix’s experience with Colma is hanging out there with different goth and death-punky girls in high school. He’d come into the city on the ferry and meet up with girls he already knew or meet them at coffee shops. Wasn’t really ever his idea to go to Colma, but it was like a local Mecca for the powdered face and raccoon eye-shadowed set. And an aphrodisiac. He’d be lying if he said he’d never gotten frisky-freaky while surrounded by tombs and grave markers.

  Now he only comes down here to bowl with Audrey and the H&K crew once in a while. Cheap pitchers of nasty beer make bowling three to five times better, depending on which type you get.

  Felix follows Rudy out of the BART car and through Colma Station.

  Felix says, “So, what was up with that shot of an intersection? There wasn’t anything in it.”

  “There was when I took it. Well, sort of,” Rudy responds.

  Felix frowns slightly and says, “I don’t get it.”

  “Me neither. I could see it… but the camera couldn’t pick it up. Spooky shit, right? And that’s saying something considering what I can compare it to now.”

  “I heard that. Why don’t you just ask this Var-height, though?”

  Rudy shrugs and says, “There are still some things he won’t tell me. Not yet, anyway.”

  Rudy and Felix cross Mission and El Camino Real, cruise up to A street, and head down it. Then they cross Hillside Boulevard, cut down Linden, and end up on Hoffman Street which borders one of the largest cemetery areas.

  As they walk, Felix notices that Rudy is visibly nervous. He keeps glancing sideways into the large cemetery to their right then closes his eyes, opens them again, and locks his eyes on the street ahead until he can’t help looking again.

  Felix looks out into the cemetery and sees nothing but what you’d expect. Grass, grave markers, trees.

  “What’s up? You cool?” Felix asks.

  “Just keep walking.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I should just cut through on Chester, one over. Totally forgot. Yeah, I’ll do that next time. I hate this walk now.”

  Felix says, “‘Now’?”

  “Now that I can see.”

  Felix starts to open his camera bag.

  “No. Not here. Just walk,” Rudy insists. He speeds up a bit too.

  They pass a condo complex built into and bordering on the northeast corner of the cemetery. Funny place for it.

  On the other side of that complex is a gatehouse and stop sign at the entrance of what must be a gated community. Rudy rounds the corner and passes the gatehouse, waving to the guy in it.

  The guy’s uniform includes a flat, wide-brimmed hat with tied tassels and a knee-length jacket with a badge on the chest and decorative epaulets and he looks like a cross between an East German border guard and a southern sheriff.

  The guard looks at Rudy like he’s confused but doesn’t say anything to them as they enter the community.

  It’s gated, sure, but instead of mansions or even moderately nice houses, it’s a large, protected community of doublewide mobile homes. Come to think of it, it’s more fenced than gated… Basically a nice trailer park.

  They walk down the street they came in on passing several possible left turns and probably twenty-five or thirty homes on the right.

  As he walks behind Rudy, Felix wonders what it would feel like to have a cemetery for a backyard. Cooler than a golf-course.

  Stranger than a golf-course, though, too.

  Probably pretty eerie at night.

  I bet full moons are creepy as hell.

  I’d keep my south-facing windows totally covered for sure.

  I would… uh… I…

  Felix realizes he doesn’t see Rudy anymore and stops. His head feels foggy. Sounding like it would if heard from the bottom of a deep pool, he hears someone yell, “Hey, Felix!”

  He turns around and sees that Rudy is standing several house widths back down the sidewalk.

  He’s in front of a… kind of vague… um…

  Felix looks up at the mostly cloudy sky.

  Nice, crisp day.

  He looks across the street at the row of houses.

  I wonder…

  Has there ever been a two-story mobile home?

  That would be weird. How would you build it–?

  “Felix, come back here!”

  Someone’s calling me? Oh, it’s Rudy. He’s standing down the sidewalk in front of a… a… uh…

  “Felix, just walk back to me! Don’t look at anything else!”

  Okay, sure.

  Felix starts down the sidewalk, resisting the urge to look at anything but Rudy. He makes it to him but he feels a little dizzy.

  Rudy puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “I know this is weird, but… look to your left.”

  Felix tries to look left but it makes him really tired and dizzy. There’s nothing there anyway, so he looks back at Rudy.

  Rudy’s acting strange.

  “There are two mobile homes to your left. I know it’s hard to look at them. Keep trying. Knowing they’re there should help.”

  What? He must be messing with me. He probably won’t quit unless I do what he asks, though. Felix tries to look again.

  Rudy points to his right and says, “There’s the porch and front door. And windows there and there.” Felix focuses on Rudy’s finger because everything else that direction is blurry.

  ‘It’s like pointing a finger at the moon. Focus on the finger, and miss all that heavenly glory.’

  He chuckles.

  I should watch Enter the Dragon again. It’s funny how the end part with the mirrors and the evil claw guy is similar to the end part in Lady From Shanghai. I bet they ripped that setup off–

  “Felix!”

  “What?” Felix asks, annoyed.

  “Keep looking. There are two doublewide trailers to your left. I promise you. Look.”

  Felix sighs and looks at where Rudy is pointing again. Rudy starts gesturing and making angled rectangular shapes with his hand motions. He describes as he gestures, “There’s the lawn… kitchen windows… fence between the two…”

  “Lawn, windows, fence, the roof on the house…”

  There are two mobile homes to my left?

  “They’re there, Felix.”

  There are two mobile homes to my left.

  He sees the vague boxy shapes through the dense murk of his confusion. They become clearer in the wake of the hand gestures Rudy is making. Felix shakes his head to clear it and decides he’s seeing what’s actually there.

  Rudy’s right. What the fuck?

  There are two mobile homes to his left. Everything’s still vague and blurry, though. There’s a seven-foot wood slat fence between them that gives the impression they are one combined unit and a patchwork of tarps between the houses over the yard created by the fences.

  “I see them now. What’s going on?”

  “He keeps this amped up so they can’t find him. He said it’s like what they use to failsafe outbreaks of perceptive clarity, only cranked to eleven.”

  “What, what, and huh?”

  “Just follow me,” Rudy says. He takes a step forward, so Felix does.

  For a moment, it feels like walking toward the fan in a wind tunnel. The blurry fog puts up some kind of resistance and he feels like looking away. There’s a flash and now he desperately wants to turn around and forget what’s in front of him. Then his foot touches down on the turf of a little front “lawn” and the resistance is gone.

  Felix looks around, seeing the connected mobile homes clearly for the first time. Th
e one they are closer to is a pale yellow and the connected one a pale green. The fence is painted pastel blue. He looks through picture windows closest to them and sees a living room with teacups on an old oak table. Floral print chairs.

  Felix takes a few steps into the short turf yard and looks into the smaller kitchen windows. One is up halfway and he can hear humming through the screen. There’s an old white woman in a grandma muumuu wearing thick bifocals with a neck chain. She’s washing dishes.

  The murk is totally gone. He looks around for any signs of it but there are none.

  It was so overpowering.

  He does notice several small, black devices installed along the roofs of the two mobile homes. They spin and resemble pinwheels on casual inspection, but they are more like intricately layered, icosagonal wire meshes like slices of a demidekeract or 10-demicube. These are at the end of foot-long pencil rods that have thinner rods running parallel to each other, perpendicular to the height. This gives them the look of little antennas. Felix suspects they are more like emitters, though.

  Rudy says, “This way.”

  Felix follows him back around the northwest corner of the yellow doublewide to a low wooden porch under an overhang that stretches almost the full length of the house. The door is in a frame that comes out from the outer wall a couple feet. It’s a little odd, but so is the connecting fence when compared with the rest of the mobile homes in this place.

  Oh, and the whole memory resistance fog thing is a little weird too.

  Rudy presses a doorbell in the frame.

  Felix notices a small camera mounted above the door. He looks around and sees that there are more mounted in two corners of the overhang. Uh… paranoia or necessary? Which would bother me more?

  The door buzzes and there’s a click. Rudy opens the door and steps into what looks like a short hallway with shiny walls. He turns back and gestures for Felix to follow.

  Felix steps in and closes the door behind him. He hears the door click again as it locks automatically.

  The small hallway is currently lit by a dangling bare bulb emitting soft white light. There is another bulb that’s not on. It’s dangling further down on a parallel cord from almost the same spot as the first and it looks to be a dark blue with markings etched in the translucent paint.