[Doc Faustus]

“Why don’t you do it?” Noah replied. He vanished into the hallway and then his room where he sat staring at the walls and wondering what he was dealing with, what he and his brother had unleashed and what it was that made him able to proliferate it. Was something wrong with him? Was he dead inside or just not alive enough? His friend and his enemy, his hope for the future, his cash cow and everything he thought a monster was were one and the same. He thought about the things that made science intrigue him so much, the idea that the same elements were everywhere. When all these thoughts came together, congealing like the mud itself, absorbing supplanting the native soil in his head, he cried. Even with all the despair and hopelessness of his home, he could still seldom bring himself to cry. This was worth the tears, the understanding that science as he knew it applied to the discovery outside was too much. If it lived, he had to find out how to kill it, if it didn’t, he might very well have to die himself.
Kyle came in and it was on his shoes, on the cuffs of his pants, soaking through to his shins and ankles. There was a dripping trail leading up the stairs, bits of a green, disgusting mess in the front hall. He opened the door to his room, handed out the baggies, took the money and waved goodbye, following the shadowy sirens down the moist pink tunnel to Marilyn, the moist pink tunnel to bliss. Again, he ventured through the gate, again he found her waiting and again and again and again, he took in her skin, felt the paradise inside her and left some of him there too. He heard her little moans, but he wondered why they turned into screams. The gates to the bedchamber burst open and standing there was the ogre, ten feet tall, wide as a truck with a face somewhere between that of a pig and a bear, green, tusked and bestial.
“Help me, “ Marilyn cooed, “help me…”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, baby…” he whispered tenderly, he kissed her once before he opened up his desk drawer and reached in for the hunting knife he carried for protection every now and then. The blade was three feet long, a sword of lambent energy, glowing blues and reds. He held it over his head, screaming death at the monster, screaming his love and his power and his indomitable spirit, striking again and again. He thought the ogre would defend itself more, using the black, wicked claws that it would rip apart his angel with, but it didn’t. It merely gave out an awful bellow as it fell dead. He hid and waited for the footsteps coming up the hall, and hid behind the door, knowing that trouble would come.
The creature’s mate was smaller and more wiry. It lacked the imposing musculature, but he was sure that some kind of speed and ferocity had to lurk in its firm, ropy frame. The body was covered in thick, draconic scales as black as the long, oily hairy on its misshapen head. For a moment, he thought from something in its eyes that it had to be a person. But he couldn’t let the hag’s black magic fool him, it was surely just another of the monsters that had come for his lover. He didn’t let it fill him with false remorse as he jumped it and wrestled it to the ground. Nor did he let its muffled pleas for mercy confuse him. He opened its throat and watched with delight as the ink sprayed from it.
When Noah first heard his father yelling, he thought nothing of it. There wasn’t much time for words though. The yell got cut off abruptly as his mother’s high heels clicked down the hall. There was no denying it after the second set of screams. Kyle wasn’t just struggling or screaming or tripping balls in front of his parents, something was up. He couldn’t call the police about this mess. This wasn’t anything they would ever have touched, this wasn’t anything they’d believe anyway. He reached under his bed for the hammer he’d been keeping there and ran to Kyle’s room, hoping things had resolved themselves.
He should have known he was being set up when the door just opened. It hadn’t been locked, in spite of whatever had happened. He didn’t have time to raise the hammer and defend himself. There was only time for shock and the pain from the knife in his stomach. There was only time for one last thought to run through his head. It was the thought that the dirt beneath us is everywhere, that the air we breathe is everywhere, that protons, neutrons and electrons are everywhere and there is no stopping that. Not Steve McQueen, not Godzilla, not John Agar can stop Hell bubbling to the surface, can stop the need for pigs to wallow in mud or the will of the ground we walk on. The mud was the ground beneath and it was going to be everywhere.
There was only silence when the last of the monsters fell dead and the solace of Marilyn’s warm smile. There was the comfort of her body and the light of her love and the only addiction he would ever need fed again. There was nothing better than this. The mud that gave it to him was a gift from God, a share of the wonders of Heaven that outdid the best of his stuff. As his brother had earlier, Kyle cried as he understood the mud. The earth had given him pot, opium, and mushrooms, but now it gave him Heaven. For a moment, he wondered when he would stop tripping, but he realized he would have to dismiss this from his mind to be truly able to enjoy it. He gave himself to Marilyn and the mud and not for a moment could he feel his hardon go soft.
When his eyes were his own, he saw four corpses and he was lying on top of one of them. His sister was all blood, bruises and shattered bones from hours and hours of rape. Numb, defenseless Caroline’s living death was over and she was given at last the mercy of the real thing. So too had Noah, and his mother and his father. Alone in the house with two dead women and two dead men, the gifts the mud had given him were clear. He felt the harshest sobriety he’d ever felt before, a clear mind twice as heavy as it used to be. He had hated life without drugs because there was nothing to challenge him and now he saw that great things moved against him. Even with the harshness of his awakening, it didn’t take him long to figure out what Noah had, to remember that the mud had eaten the compost heap, and had crept around the back door to the front steps. With all the mud that had soaked through his pants, he’d been in it deeper than ever, seeing on the clock that it had been more than just a few hours, it had been almost half a day. He stared out his window not wanting to see what he knew he would.
The front steps were the beginning. The mud was next door, at the house across the street, and at the house next door to that one. People filled the muddy streets, covered in chunks of the plague of dreams that had infected Kyle and caused the death of his family. The mud had bubbled completely to the surface and the town belonged to it. He hoped that some would avoid it, drive over it, see it coming, but that hope waned when drops of rain beat against his window. The mud and the gas were everywhere, the air people breathed as well as the earth they trod on. He stepped outside and he felt like screaming to them, seeing if even in their state they could hear him and gain some sense.
So he stepped outside, and he did begin to yell. He wasn’t sure if he should yell “go back inside” or “get out of town” or “get help”, since he wasn’t sure which one would do any good. None, it seemed, since as he yelled, they still continued to gather, called to mass by some unseen churchbells. Their eyes had grown wide, all pupils, obsidian marbles bulging from their heads, watering like their ravenous mouths. He knew what they hungered for, after all their years of boredom and all their failed attempts at satisfaction. It was the same thing that his mouth had watered for, the taste, the sweet, alien taste of experience. The gas began to take him as he saw in the distance, where they marched to.
At the center of town, the earth had opened up, and the mud bubbled to the surface in great, rippling pools. None of them were shy about it, none had reservations, none waited to see if the water was fine or the mud too high to survive in. The mud did not drag them in, as he thought it would. He had hoped it would be as simple as drowning. It shifted, molded itself to accommodate their bodies and make sure there would be room for all. Each person had a place, a little rippling pool of their own that squeezed and melded together with the other pools as they entered. Perhaps it was the beginning of the gas, but it looked like little hands were rising from the mud to help the mesmerized townsfolk rip off their clothes. They reached out for another, embracing and fighting, strangling and groping. The principal of the elementary school was holding the man who ran the grocery store’s head under as he scratched at his sides, two gas station attendants wrestled with and fondled the old lady who ran the Goodwill store, the minister swam and splashed around before gleefully coiling his body up with a pregnant cheerleader’s. There was no town left, just a blur of mud and flesh. In the wet, green, swampy crater at the center of town all of its citizens were becoming one awful, gooey mass. If the will of the earth was unity, it had achieved it. Kyle’s shock faded as Marilyn walked down the stairs and out the door to join him. Half of her face was Caroline’s, beaten, bruised and contorted in her final screams. But somehow to Kyle, she never looked more beautiful. She offered her hand and he took it, joining all he knew of family and community.