Chrysalis
Walter goes feral
[Still with The Sanguine Experiment. This story follows immediately after Blue Heron. Linen and Walter are in an abandoned barn in a valley somewhere north of Milesburg. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Three of them.
He watched as they crossed the snowy meadow, every now and then plunging in where the snow mounded up over bent bracken. The sun, just off noon, dropped a tick. Again the light veered.
Year upon year, hunting with his father and his father’s friends. Cronies, politicians. They hunted deer, of course. Elk. Coyote. Bear. Small game. The days had crawled.
The three hunters did not seem to see him sitting in his La-Z-Boy. But maybe they saw the recliner, burgundy against white snow. They came on. A fat middle-aged guy with a .22, a thin old guy with .22, and a fit-looking guy carrying a big bolt-action rifle. It had been years since Walter hunted, but he knew nothing but small game should be in season this late in February. And who shoots small game with a rifle designed to take down big targets — bears, people — at a distance?
Someone hunting big game out of season, that’s who.
No point moving. He was well within range of the big rifle, the thirty-aught-six or whatever it was, while his shotgun barely gave him a 100 yards.
And here they were.
“Where’d all this stuff come from?” The big guy slapped the La-Z-Boy and kicked at some books half-covered with snow.
“Blew here.”
“Bums, hermits.”
“Someone’s wife kicked her old man out.”
“Fucking bitches.”
“Remember Nick’s wife? Now that’s funny — ”
“You see footprints?”
“Not really.”
They tromped on up the hill and into the barn.
But Walter, soon as he realized they couldn’t see him, was already there.
He stood in the dry straw between the door and his chrysalis, between the three men and his chrysalis, the case now amber-dark, plum-dark, but only three days ago pale as a Star Wars bakta tank, tough-skinned, pulsing over the now-near-invisible form of Linen inside it.
He planned to protect the chrysalis against predators until whatever was happening inside happened. He had not thought about human threats. Frantically he tried to pile straw over the amber sac.
Three shadows fell across his chrysalis, through his body, he realized. He now cast no shadow at all.
One man asked another, “What is that thing?”
“Don’t go too close.”
Walter turned. “Now, just stand back.”
The three men did not hear or see him. They stepped closer.
“Looks like it’s trapped something.”
“Someone. There’s someone in there.”
The fat guy handed the old guy his .22, reached under his coat, and unsnapped a leather sheath at his belt. He pulled out a big Gerber and took another step into the barn.
“I’m going to open it.”
“Look out,” the old guy said, “might be spiders. This might be a spider’s catch.”
The big guy said, “What spider makes that?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
“All right, you poke it, but get out of the way quick. If it moves, I’ll shoot.”
The fat guy took another step forward. The big guy chambered a round.
Walter did not now want to kill people but wanting was academic. And he had hunted, like it or not, from the time was a little boy until he was in his late teens. He lined up the shot and fired.
The barn rocked. Staggering, Walter fired the other barrel, taking out the old guy, who had been lined up almost directly behind the fat guy with the knife.
But Walter wasn’t strong enough to manage his own gun. As the recoil hit him a second time in the same pocket of flesh, he stumbled backward, struck the warm resilience of his chrysalis, and staggered up again. He saw the big guy still standing, not sure where to place a shot, and choosing the only target he could find.
My chrysalis
No no no no
The onslaught of gray feathers exploded into the man’s face, buffeting his head and neck, rendering the long rifle useless. It fell to the straw. But the big hunter was no fool. Next thing, Walter thought, would be hands on the heron’s neck.
The heron reared his head back. The beak made for spearing frogs drilled deep into the hunter’s eye.
The heron stood on his chrysalis and spread his wings over his fallen enemies.
Walter swallowed the eyeball he’d speared. He could eat without hesitation in heron form, he realized. Eyeballs, frogs, fish.
Hungry and enjoying the briny taste, he flapped down and stalked toward big guy’s body, where he fished out the second eyeball. From there it was not far to the fat guy and the skinny old guy. Encouraged, the heron fluttered a couple of steps and glided the 50 yards downhill to the creek. He fished until dark.
After sunset he staggered back up the hill to the barn. By moonlight he tried to figure out what had happened.
No no no no
There was his shotgun. There were his things, everywhere for yards, clearly his.
There were three bodies, two of them also scattered everywhere.
And his chrysalis, dim, untouched.
I would never have done this, he thought. One body is inconvenient, but three all over the place. I would never. This is a dream.
But if this is a dream, then I’m safe home with Linen and have not shot anyone.
Worse, in man’s form again he found his belly full of things a human can’t tolerate — six eyeballs, a hibernating frog, two live fish.
He wanted to vomit them up but thought he might need the energy surplus. Then he thought about bones. Bags full of needles slowly dissolving in his gut. Stomach full of steel. He wept beside his chrysalis. The fish took a long time to die. He rocked back and forth, keening with pain. Finally he turned back into the bird again — a heron could deal with the bones. But the heron had an unaccountable urge to peck at the chrysalis’ membrane. Finally Walter drove his beak into the ground, trapping himself.
Before dawn he woke up, human again, his mouth gummed with cold mud.
He choked up dirt, then a couple of pellets. He had shat himself while trapped in heron form, a rope of greenish-white excrement that burned his anus and the backs of his thighs.
He lay there a long time. Blood and mucous trailed from his mouth and that long heron poop clung half-frozen to his legs and ass.
Fuck your allegories, he said to the chrysalis.
Three days ago, he had found a five-gallon bucket in the barn. He filled it and kept it near the chrysalis so it wouldn’t freeze. Several times a day since they’d been at the barn he washed his chrysalis. Now he washed himself with water from the bucket.
The cold did not hurt him but he liked the chrysalis’ warmth. He wrapped his arms around it, then mounted it and lay along top of it. Lifting his hips he scooped his penis and laid it between his body and the chrysalis. He rubbed the chrysalis, comforting himself.
With a soft anguish he climaxed on himself and the chrysalis.
For a few seconds he felt only the heartbeat echoing up, faint but steady, through the bacta or amniotic fluid or honey or whatever held Linen suspended inside the chrysalis. His sweet jagged rhythm meet that depth and calm. He imagined he was falling into a spring, sinking fast through azure and amber and brown and then gone.
Then he realized what he had done.
He slid into the straw and held his head in his hands.
no no no
What if the chrysalis was permeable?
no no no no no
He picked up the bucket. He fetched more water up the hill. He washed the chrysalis, then, for a second time, himself.
He sat beside his chrysalis, one arm over it. I’m sorry, he said.
He imagined Linen answering, It’s nothing. A funny, innocuous little memory. Then teasing him: And you call me feral.
Walter felt unreasonably angry with Linen. If she would wake up he would show her. He wouldn’t even speak to her. Maybe not for an hour.
He got up and began to scrabble through the disturbed snow near the barn, hoping to find some of his clothes.
Later, dressed and with a few possessions gathered into his satchel, he sat by his chrysalis again. He must move it, he thought, after dark.
Coyotes and fishers and who knows what else would come again for the blood and bodies in the barn. Some had visited last night, he noticed. The fat guy’s nose was missing.
Humans might come, too, alarmed by the gunfire or, more likely, following the three men’s footprints to find their missing family members.
The chrysalis weighed more than he did and must be carried in both arms like a slick floppy roll of carpet. He could barely stagger a dozen yards with it before he must drop to one knee, then let it slide to the ground — barely controlling its slither — and wait for his heartbeat to slow down enough to make another effort. It had taken him an hour to get his chrysalis the 50 yards from the creek to the barn. He had been so afraid of hurting the membrane.
But there was no help for it. He must carry it far from here before dawn.
He knelt by his chrysalis, draping his body over it, head to the side so he could watch the barn door, and waited for dark.
As the light changed he remembered his grandmother’s spare bedroom and the light falling just so in late winter. His grandmother kept a worn-out Raggedy Ann doll, big as a toddler, on her spare room bed. Three-year-old Walter slept in the spare room with the doll. One evening before supper he sought her out and made love to her — pulling off her clothes, a little frustrated by the knot in her lacy apron, kissing her and rubbing his belly on hers. He lay in the dark, holding himself where the doll had given him a sweet feeling. He kissed the doll all over her face — the black button eyes, the painted, triangle red nose. Sunset fell across the Shaker furniture, the white crocheted blanket. The room turned crimson, then dusk.
The next visit the doll was gone. Walter searched the house for her but did not find her. He imagined her lying alone in the dark, as he often lay alone, wondering when he would come and comfort her.
He wanted to ask for her but thought his father might whip him for handling the doll as he had. Then he thought maybe they had thrown the doll away or burned her because of him.
By the next visit, he’d forgotten all about her, and did not remember her until now. He gave a yelp and clutched his stomach, struck with the unmitigated pain of that loss. Gone, he thought. Gone.
He began kissing the chrysalis, dozens then hundreds of kisses. The amber was opaque as old honey now. He could not see Linen’s features in the dim light. And the membrane, which at first had fit Linen supple as a newborn’s caul, was taking a form of its own, a humanlike ovoid. It was still resilient, not hard, but certainly not slithery as an egg sac. Inside was Linen, if that blurred form was still human. He wept, half-imagining his tears would wake Linen like a girl in a fairy story. But no such thing happened.
He remembered now why he killed people. Especially women. They were made to be hurt, they walked around asking for it, and the world obliged by hurting them. Much better never to live. Barring that, much better to die soon, without pain if possible, but at any rate to get out while the getting was good.
The soul he had lost, having fed upon Linen’s blood trail for three days as it tracked them, caught up with him and slid inside as if it never had gone anywhere.
You failed her, the Sad Guy told him. She would have died happy if you’d had a little more guts.
Walter couldn’t help but agree. They were all so eager to please.
Get up, you maggot, the Sad Guy said to him. You couldn’t kill her, so now you must carry her.
Walter lifted his face and wiped his eyes, then looked at his hand. Even he could see through it now. He had his ethereal body at last. It had just taken a few weeks.
Outside, he heard the wind whisper in the trees across the valley and lift the papery dead leaves of the poplars nearer at hand. He could step into the wind and be gone.
Walter turned his head to study the offal strewn across the barn, the weighty piece of amber he must now carry in arms made of air, and the lumpy shadow that was his La-Z-Boy lying overturned outside.
The sanguine experiment had succeeded.