Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [13]
Monkish shapes in tornado-green tunics shuffled behind frail curtains of snakeskins where embalmed and dismantled bodies sprawled on stone tables. Jackal-faced children could be seen gnawing on carcasses in a cage—and in transparent jars floated lilies that looked as if they had sprouted tentacled nerves … frogs becoming human embryos, or almost human … while in slick, drained pits there lurked soft machine reptiles and enormous tube worms made of meticulous spun metal wrapped in an oozing tissue cultivated in vats.
In the hotter months the boy would flail about in his corn-shuck bed, so that Rapture took to giving him a hypnotic that she made using melatonin. While this remedy often controlled the sleeping problem, it did not alter the periods of black depression the boy could slip into, or the relationship he carried on with his dead twin sister, whom, of course, he had never known except in that blind amphibious time within Rapture’s womb. He often said that his sister was right beside him, and if asked whether he could see her he would answer that he could feel her and that he could smell her. Like licorice and rain wind, he said. Rapture, who had grown up with revenants and hairball oracles, was more accepting of the boy’s beliefs—but Hephaestus argued that imaginary friends were one thing, an imaginary dead sister something else.
On top of his already radically superior intelligence, the boy’s mood swings and bouts of disjointed behavior did not make his socializing with other children in Zanesville any easier. That he would have some kind of seizure or burst into tears without reason, or perform some inexplicably cruel deed, made any hope for his schooling awkward and trips into town tense. Hephaestus even steered clear of other Adventists (although in truth he was worried about them learning about the Ark).
The family was just finishing their repast and Hephaestus was about to inquire further about the boy’s ideas on the Ark (a discussion he hoped would lead to an opportunity to suggest the possibility, at least, of returning to school in autumn and spending more time with children his own age before this became an issue that the reform marms would raise), when their fifteen-year-old redbone, Tip (short for Tippecanoe), woke up under the porch and began howling lugubriously to announce the arrival of Philomela Ogulnick and Edna Vanderkamp, the town’s two most notorious gossips and exactly the kind of women the family most dreaded seeing. Neither parent was surprised to look up and see that the lad had skedaddled.
Hephaestus had an inkling that the women were an advance party sent out by the men of Zanesville he was in debt to, while Rapture was pretty sure they were on a mission regarding Lloyd’s lack of attendance in school (a tedious waste of time for him and all too often a torture of taunts and spitballs to boot). As it turned out, they were both right—and what was more, Philomela’s Joe had eaten some horse chestnuts by accident and had the trots and would Rapture recommend barley water?
Of course, little Lloyd gave all this not a thought, slipping off in his mind the moment he had slipped away from the house. He went, as he always did in such situations, to his secret refuge beyond the veronica that Rapture harvested for her soporifics. The main Zanesville cemetery extended from the old Wheeling Road to Mill Run and was surrounded by chestnut trees, but this was a different, eldritch sort of place. The sprinkling of humble graves dated back only to the days of Ebenezer Zane and John McIntire, who had founded the town, but Lloyd liked to think they were much older. The tombs were marked by unnamed lichen-stricken stones but they filled him with admiration and awe, for he saw them not as stones but as doors to the world where his sister lived and played, whirling about in a singsong game until, dizzy