Borderlands 5 Read online

  And it made me come much faster.

  There was a circle of old cabins out past Dripping Springs in one of those pockets of private land in the middle of the national forest. I’d heard that it had once been a resort—or that the onetime owner had tried to make it into a resort—but it had failed and been abandoned long before my time, and now was the type of place that local kids said was haunted. I didn’t know if it really was haunted, but it was certainly a spot that bums might make their own or that drug dealers might find desirable: remote, isolated, far from civilization and the prying eyes of others. Because it was technically on private land, when a late-summer lightning fire started and word came down that the cabins were burning, they called out the volunteer fire department rather than have the Forest Service put it out—which would have been the most logical thing to do. But, as usual, jurisdictional concerns trumped common sense, and shortly after midnight the ten of us were speeding down the control road through mile after mile of oak and juniper and ponderosa pine, between rugged bluffs and rolling hills, in and out of hidden gorges and seasonal stream-carved canyons, until we reached the flat land on the other side of Dripping Springs.

  The cabins were gone when we got there, little more than charred piles of ash hemmed in by black and still-burning sections of frame. Luckily, a dirt road circling the perimeter of the old resort had acted as a break and contained the fire somewhat, keeping it from setting the entire forest ablaze. A lone finger stretch of brush on the north end was burning brightly and had created the only real problem we had to face, but we had ten men, two trucks and full pumpers—and even if we ran out of water, we had snake hoses long enough to tap any nearby creek, spring or pond we could find.

  We set to work.

  It was nearly morning before we finished, the sky in the east brightening enough to turn the trees into silhouettes by the time the last of the flames was extinguished. Blue-white smoke rose from the ashes around us, dimming the sun as the day dawned and we finished repacking the trucks. Through the haze, I saw a building behind the burned brush, a cabin of rough hewn wood that looked more ancient than the old growth trees surrounding it, although I did not understand how that could be possible. Either the cabin had not been there before or else the fire had cleared out the brush that hid it from view because none of us had seen it previously. I stepped closer to get a better look, then immediately stepped back. The facade of the windowless structure bespoke great age, and there was about it an air of dread and unsettled malevolence that shook me more than I was willing to admit.

  “God lives there,” Andre said, sidling next to me.

  I looked at him askance. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “That’s always been the rumor. That God lives out here. That’s why there’s no graffitti, no beer bottles or syringes or cigarette butts or McDonald’s bags. Everyone’s always been afraid to come out this way because God is here. And watching.”

  “You knew about this cabin?”

  “Not this cabin exactly. But I knew God’s home was in these woods, somewhere near the resort, and when I saw this place, I knew this was it.”

  “Yeah,” Rossi said. “And the Easter Bunny’s vacation house is right behind it.”

  The rest of us laughed, but Andre remained resolute in his conviction, and I had to admit that his somber certitude freaked me out a little. If it had only been the two of us, I would have acceded to his wishes, left the cabin alone and we would have returned to town. But there were others here, and they were curious, so I had to be curious, and I joined the group as we made our way over the still smoldering ashes across the charred dirt to the ancient shack.

  It was small, I saw as we approached. Not small as in limited square footage—although it was that, too—but small as in short, as though it had been made for people not as tall as we were. The top of the front door was just about eye level. I reached up and was able to place my hand on the roof.

  The door was stuck but unlocked, and after several shoulder shoves, it opened, scraping the dirty wooden floor. I’d been expecting a one-room cabin based on the exterior of the structure, but instead we found ourselves in a narrow hallway that ran the width of the structure. We filed in one by one, Mick and Garcia and Big Bill and Ed Barr flipping on their flashlights, all of us ducking, and it occurred to me that this would be a perfect place for an ambush, that some psycho could be lying in wait just around the corner and take us out one-by-one as we stepped into the next room. There were no cries of shock or pain, however, only the ordinary speech of continued conversation as my stooping fellow firefighters rounded the end of the hallway.

  I followed, and once again, I was surprised. The cabin went back far deeper than its exterior facade would indicate, and the long room in which we found ourselves sloped steeply downward from the door, with the ceiling at the entrance barely above five feet and that at the opposite end twelve to fifteen feet high. The room had obviously been dug into the ground at an angle, but there were no windows, the floor was wood as were the walls, and that gave the room the appearance of space that grew as it moved away from us, like the optical illusion of an amusement park haunted shack.

  “It’s like a fuckin’ fun house,” Big Bill said, shining his light around. Andre remained silent.

  We clomped down the sloping floor in our heavy boots. There was furniture only on the sides of the room: two twin tables with collections of nearly identical gray rocks arranged on their dusty tops. Though it stretched back far, the room was half the width of the hallway, so there had to be another chamber behind the wall to our left, although no way to enter it from this room. In front of us, however, a closed door was built into the back wall, a construct of solid wood hewn from a single section of tree that had been bolted to the surrounding planks. It had no handle or knob, no visible means by which it might be opened, and there was something both secretive and intriguing about the tightly sealed entrance. It was Ed Barr who said what all of us were thinking: “Let’s see what’s back there.”

  “No!” Andre said, and there was fear in his voice.

  “This building’s obviously abandoned, the area around it’s burned to a crisp, let’s break down the door and see what’s behind it.”

  “You can’t!” Andre shouted.

  “Out of the way.” Rossi pushed him aside and hefted his ax. Andre actually started crying, and that, more than anything else, creeped me out. Standing half-underground in an ancient windowless cabin in front of a knobless door watching a grown man the size of a football player sob was just plain unnerving, and at that moment I wanted to get the hell out of there.

  The door was tough and it took several swings, but Rossi finally managed to smash a hole through the wood large enough to put his hand and arm through. There was an inside latch, and he used it to open the door. Four flashlights shone into the darkness, and there was sudden silence as we saw what lay in the small dank room beyond.

  It was a mummified creature of some sort, a wrinkled shriveled figure that looked like a dried black monkey. The skin of its face had been pulled back from its skull, and it appeared to be grinning, its sharp rotted teeth exposed in a way that made it seem insanely gleeful. It was seated on the floor of the small room, next to a small pile of those gray rocks. Behind it, a rounded section of the wall had been bleached white, as though exposed to harsh sunlight or radiation.

  Andre fell to his knees in front of the monkey thing like some primitive tribesman worshipping a stone idol. Rossi dropped his ax and followed suit. I would have laughed, but I could see similar expressions of awe on the faces of the others, and I have to admit that I felt something myself. I thought of Anna Howell’s buried panties, and at that moment I wished that I had not stolen them, had not planted them, had not peed on them. I was filled with an emptiness, a sadness, a sense that I had gone off track somewhere, that I had lost something that should have been very important to me. The feeling radiating from the dead creature was one of great sorrow, and its mood aff
ected my own, made me want to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

  And then… Something changed.

  I don’t know what it was, if it came from that mummified creature in the middle of the floor, if it came from my fellow firemen or if it was simply a figment of my imagination, but the sadness I felt was suddenly replaced by fear, a cold bone-deep terror that left me rooted in place, filled with the certainty that all of us were doomed, that we would never leave this place but would spend eternity in this tiny room with that hideous black monkey.

  To my left, Ed Barr let out a strangled stifled cry. Andre was sobbing, though from religious fervor or despair it was impossible to tell. Garcia’s flashlight dimmed, went out. Big Bill’s and the others’ followed suit and moments later we were in darkness, an inky jet so deep and penetrating that I could not tell whether my eyes were open or closed. I stood there, stock still, waiting for the end. Someone cried out. Someone else giggled. There were more noises, more cries, and I felt soft fingers gently stroke my hand and then teeth sink painfully into my right calf.

  I have no idea how much time we spent in that place, but by the time we emerged, the sun was high in the sky. Everyone was disheveled. Big Bill was naked.

  We left the mummy there, sealing up the room as best we could with additional branches and mud from a small slough to the side of the shack. That was Andre’s idea, and the rest of the brigade went along with it, some more willingly than others. I wanted to burn the fucking place down—whatever that dried black creature was, it did not deserve to exist—but I knew I was a minority of one and kept my feelings to myself. It would be enough just to get away from here and make sure that I never came anywhere near that cabin and its horrid occupant again.

  I quit the volunteer fire department a few days after. So did Rossi.

  So did Ed Barr.

  And though we saw each other on almost a daily basis, we didn’t talk about it, didn’t ask each other why, didn’t discuss what we’d seen, what had happened in that shack.

  A week later, Andre killed himself. Ate his shotgun in the woods. And we didn’t talk about that either.

  After that, the panties sprouted. I was standing in front of the oak tree when the moon finally reemerged after a week of cloudy nights, and I saw a pale shoot poking upward through the mulchy dirt, a blue-white almost gelatinous tendril that was clearly growing, aspiring to some greater form.

  What would it be, I wondered, when it reached maturity? I pulled out my pecker and pissed on it.

  I saw Anna Howell the next day, waved to her over the fence while she hung her laundry out to dry, tried not to look at the underwear she was pinning on the clothesline. She smiled at me, waved back, said it was a nice day, and if she suspected that I had stolen a pair of her panties she did an amazing job of hiding it.

  I slunk back inside and realized that I had some soul searching to do. What exactly did I want from that thing I was growing in the forest? As much as I admired and recognized Anna Howell’s beauty, I still did not desire her, and I did not think that I was growing the woman for a sex partner, as a substitute for the real McCoy.

  The woman.

  I said it to myself for the first time, admitting what I had known subconsciously all along—that I was growing a person from Anna Howell’s panties.

  A woman. But why?

  That was still not clear to me, though I felt the impulse to continue even more strongly than I had before. My every waking moment seemed consumed with the thought of my secret in the woods, and I got through each boring day only with the knowledge that at night, if there was a moon, I would be able to visit my spot at the foot of the oak where I had buried my neighbor’s freshly laundered underwear in the soft and fertile soil.

  The next time I saw the sprout, it had a face. Under the moonlight, it had grown to nearly two feet high and now had the vague contours of a woman. Although they were closed, there were eyes, and while there was no nose to speak of, the thing had kewpie doll lips pursed in an unappealing fashion that needed only color to grant them authenticity. Small nubs halfway down the form looked as though they would eventually differentiate themselves into hands and arms.

  It seemed wrong to water the figure at this stage of its growth, so I turned my back and relieved my bladder on a bush, then zipped up and crouched down before the oak tree to look at what I’d wrought. The sight was horrible, a travesty of humanity so fundamentally unnatural that my first impulse should have been to destroy it. But instead I sat on my haunches and examined its emerging form. The figure was small but perfectly in proportion rather than dwarflike, and despite the garish elements of its evolving face, I could tell that it would grow into a beautiful woman. Looking closely, I could see a slight indentation that would become the vaginal cleft, two small bumps that would expand into breasts. It was composed of that same translucent bluish-white material, a slimy looking substance that shone in the moonlight and appeared sticky to the touch. I wanted to reach out and press my finger against the shiny skin to see if it felt the way it looked, but I did not want to jeopardize the form’s growth by tainting it with my touch, so I refrained.

  The night air was moist and dewy, the ground itself damp, but I wondered if that would be enough to keep the budding woman watered and facilitate her growth. I looked at the nascent crotch, thought about what Anna Howell’s own vagina must look like under her panties and found myself thinking that I should masturbate on the figure to provide it with moisture and nutrients.

  I stood, pulled down my pants, took my penis in hand and started stroking, my head filled with dark thoughts, my fantasy scenario one of depraved perversity, but at the last minute I pulled away, spurting all over a lushly growing fern rather than onto that blue-white flesh, grunting with animal abandon as I emptied my loins on the hapless plant.

  The pursed colorless lips seemed to me to be almost smiling.

  I arrived home long after midnight, too wound and wired to sleep, my head filled with ideas I did not want to acknowledge, my body wracked with impulses I dared not act upon. Under a lone lamp in the living room, I read the local paper which had been delivered with the mail that afternoon. On the front page was a photo of Giff McCarty, head ranger for the region. He was wearing a woman’s wig and thick mascara, his dark lipstick obvious even through the black-and-white newsprint. FOREST SERVICE OFFICIALACCUSED OF MOLESTATION, the banner headline read, and I suddenly understood why we had been called to put out the fire at the old resort. I remembered what had happened inside that shack

  God lives there and saw the madness in the old ranger’s eyes, the whorishly rouged cheeks bookending his carefully drawn lips, and I crumpled up the paper and made my way to bed.

  In my dream, I was standing at the dirty urinal of an old gas station—Enco, Richfield, Gulf, one of those chains that no longer existed—and next to me, at the adjacent urinal, was a wino, a filthy man with wild gray hair and an unkempt beard wearing a greasy topcoat and smelling of spilled beer and sewer stink. He was nearly a head shorter than me, and when I glanced over at him, he winked. I saw that he was peeing not in the urinal but on the tiled floor between his shoes. From the growing puddle on the chipped stained tile slithered reptilian creatures of every hue and color, horrid creatures with too many legs, small sickening monsters with multiple eyes but no legs at all, formless pulsating slime that inched wormlike toward me.

  “The piss of life,” the old man said, cackling. “It’s the piss of life.” And in the instant before I woke up, I realized that he was God.

  I made myself stay away after that.

  There was nothing I wanted more than to go out into the woods and continue to care for the budding being I had created, to monitor its growth by moonlight and experience the joy of watching it blossom. But I knew those drives were not mine, I knew they had been imposed on me, and as desperately as I desired to sneak into the forest in the dead of night, I forced myself to remain indoors, trying in vain to fall asleep, fighting the urge to check on
the status of the woman I had grown.

  Finally, however, I could no longer resist, and exactly two weeks after my last visit, I once again found myself slipping between the trees under the cover of night.

  The danger warnings had been heightened over the past week. Two bears had come down into the town, one of them killing a collie, and a mountain lion had mangled a cache of stuffed animals that had inadvertently been left out on a back porch at night. But I was not thinking rationally as I made my way into the woods. I was not thinking at all. I’d made no conscious decision to return, I simply found myself walking through the forest to the old oak, the action as involuntary and devoid of thought as taking a breath.

  It was gone.

  There was a hole at the foot of the tree, a ragged cavity roughly the size of a woman that was lined with old leaves and a twisted net of roots and smelled of raw sewage. I searched around for footprints or a trail of slime or something that would indicate to me in which direction it she had headed, but I was not a woodsman or a tracker, and the forest looked the same to me as it always had.

  Staring into the white netted roots that formed the womanly contours of the hole, I was reminded of something I’d seen before, a specific sight or image that nagged at the corner of my mind begging to be identified. The roots were clearly of the same substance that had formed the woman, but their bleached quality, as though they’d been exposed to a blast of radiation or a blinding burst of sunlight, reminded me of another scene entirely.

  I stepped closer, peered into the bottom of the space and saw a rotted piece of panty held down by several small gray rocks.

  It was the rocks that jiggled my memory. I suddenly knew where I had to go.

  I ran through the trees back to my neighborhood, back to my house, then hopped in my old Jeep and sped down the control road through hills and canyons and forest, braking to a dusty stop on the flat land past Dripping Springs where the resort had been.