by S. A. Hunt
pizzam4n: you know the way to a mans heart, don’t you?
B1GR3D: I sure do.
* * *
Black Velvet grumbled into the parking lot of Riverview Terrace Apartments, Joel Ellis behind the wheel, his cell phone clutched in one hand. The iPhone’s screen illuminated his face with B1GR3D’s address. This redneck better be a good cook, he thought, peering through the windshield at the apartment numbers, looking for 427. I ain’t fixin’ to put myself in some stranger-danger for no cheap-ass meat.
Building Four was in the back of the complex, a brownstone bulwark against the dark woodline. The Monte Carlo eased into a slot, washing 424’s windows with bright yellow headlight, and the engine cut off. Joel got out and scanned the row of doorways.
Eyes peered through the blinds in 427’s window.
There you are. He slipped his phone into his pocket, locked his car, and sauntered up the sidewalk. 427’s door opened and a man stepped out, considerably taller than he expected, with a slender neck and a jawline that could cut glass.
“Hey there,” said the man. He was dressed conservatively, in a flannel button-up with the sleeves rolled, and well-fit jeans.
“Sup, stepchild. You must be Big Red.”
B1GR3D smiled and gave a bashful chuckle. “That I am.”
This was always the hardest part, the awkward introductory phase, where they were still feeling out each other’s body language and weighing their own regrets and needs, trying to get comfortable and break the ice or find a reason to leave and forget it ever happened.
“Well, come on in.”
“Thank-yuh.” Joel stepped inside.
The tiny apartment was meticulously clean. Hanging on the walls were impressionistic paintings of wildlife posing dramatically in the forest—deer, foxes, mice, wolves. Large prints, from the look of it, no brushstrokes. Joel touched one of them. Thin cardboard. A ten-dollar Walmart poster. Other than a black sofa, there was only a desk with a bulky gray laptop on it and a flatscreen TV on a squat, altar-like entertainment center.
Joel sat on the sofa as Red went into the kitchen, and it crackled under his body. A slipcover encased the futon in clear protective plastic. Aluminum shafts that served as its legs stood on wooden medallions, like coasters.
To protect the carpet, he supposed.
“This remind me of my grandmama,” he said, brushing his fingertips over it. He could see himself in the TV screen as clearly as if it were a mirror. “Every piece of furniture in her house was covered in plastic. The couch, the mattresses, there was even a floormat in the living room on top of the carpet.”
“I like a clean, healthy house,” said Red’s voice. “I grew up with filthy people, neatness suits me.”
Machinery whirred to life in another room. As Red returned with two glasses, a robot hockey-puck came humming out of a dark hallway and vacuumed the carpet in front of the couch. “Roomba,” said Joel, as Red handed him a drink. His new friend had the craggy hands of a workin’ man. “Always wanted one of those.”
“It’s handy.”
Joel sniffed the water glass and took an exploratory sip. Whiskey, and it went down smoother than soda. Hardly any burn at all, with a vague maple undertone, so faint he wondered if the honey-color was playing tricks on his tongue. “Damn, nice,” he said, holding the glass up so he could see through it.
“Got the steaks on out back.” Red walked away. Joel swirled the whiskey, washed it all down his throat, and followed him through the kitchen, pouring himself another couple of fingers on the way.
“Out back” was a concrete patio about the size of a walk-in closet, with two plastic lawn chairs and a huge grill. A lone lantern-style porch light brightened the scene, and a damp phantom of October breathed across the wet grass. At the edge of Red’s tiny yard was a wilderness of pines, quiet and still and impenetrable in its darkness.
The grill was obviously where most of Red’s money went—a top-of-the-line charcoal-fired beast with wood-slat leaf tables on both sides. He opened the top and smoke billowed out, two levels of grills scissoring open like the trays in a tackle box.
On the bottom grill two porterhouse steaks, charred black and Satanic-red, sizzled angrily over a bed of glowing coals. Nestled between them were a pair of potatoes wrapped in tin foil.
Joel settled into one of the lawn chairs while Red used a pair of tongs to place spears of asparagus around the steaks, and four medallions of buttered Italian bread on the upper shelf. The aroma streaming out of the cooker was immense, an enveloping sauna of rich salt. Joel wanted to take off his shirt and bathe in the savory steam, absorb it like a sponge.
“Outstanding.”
Red smiled over his shoulder and flipped the steaks. Kssss. “I used to be a cook, on a boat.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Used to live in Maine. Near the ocean. My father worked on fishin’ boats all my life and when I graduated high school, he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. But I wasn’t into that. Dangerous work. Boring. You lose fingers. Fall overboard. Break your legs.” He tapped his head with the hinge of the tongs. “Not enough of a challenge up here. But, it was what my father wanted, and there wasn’t any convincing him otherwise. After I looked and looked for work at home, I finally had to admit to myself I was going to have to take up the family business and catch fish for a living.”
Joel sipped his whiskey, listening raptly—or, at least, the best approximation he could manage.
“So, I hooked up with this crew goin’ out that season and went out to sea.” Red flipped the bread, piece by piece. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t cut out for it after all. Those guys really shit on me. But, here’s the funny part, I turned out to be a pretty good cook. So they stashed me in the galley and put me to work makin’ dinner. That was actually where I shined.”
“Ah.” Sniff. “So what you doing now?”
Red wagged the tongs at him reproachfully. “Can’t tell you that. I’m sorry.”
“If you told me, you’d have to kill me?” It was a joke, but Joel’s face went cold anyway.
Red smirked, snorted through his nose. “Let’s just say I’m kind of a big shot around town, and if word got out that I’m, uhh—”
“Gay?”
“Well, heh. I actually swing both ways, but yeah. And you know how it is in these small-minded little quarterback-hero southern towns. My name wouldn’t make a very valuable currency anymore, put it that way.”
“Yeah, yeah. I catch what you pitchin’.”
“Do you?” Red went past him into the kitchen, squeezing his knee on the way by. “You’re a catcher, hmm?”
“Why, you tryin’ to score? Cause I’m lookin’ for a batter, baby. With a big ol’ bat.”
The former mess cook came back with plates and tonged the food onto them, then closed the grill lid and went back into the kitchen for a bottle of steak sauce and the rest of the whiskey.
Glorious, the steaks were absolutely glorious, worthy of being remembered in song, they didn’t even need the A.1. Joel and Red sat on the porch eating quietly, staring out at the twilight forest behind the building.
“So what do you do?” asked Red.
“I cook and run the register at Miguel’s Pizza up in the mountains. Up there at the bottom of the ridge from Rocktown.” Joel bit the end off of an asparagus spear. “You ever go rock climbin’?”
“Nah. Never saw the appeal.”
“Yeh,” said Joel. The moon was an orange-wedge behind the trees. “Me neither.”
Taking out his phone, he checked to see what time it was. Quarter to eleven. Man, he never got sleepy this early, after work he was usually up until two, three in the morning. Joel put down his fork and screwed a fist into one eye.
“Tired?” asked Red.
“A little bit.”
“Maybe you should take a vacation day. Play hookey.” Red grinned. “You can play hookey here with me.”
“Hookey? You think I’m a hooker, hooker?”
Red laughed
and sawed off a piece of steak. “You tell me.”
Joel’s good-natured snort turned into a yawn. He slumped in his chair, feeling more and more comfortable by the minute, until his plate was on top of his crotch and he was squinting at it, slowly cutting off bites and putting them into his mouth.
“Oh,” he said, dropping his fork with a clatter.
He tried to sit up, pushing with a heel, but his foot slid. Bracing himself with his elbows, he wriggled up a few inches and twisted to collect his fork up off the ground. It was like trying to pick up a stuffed bear with a claw machine: loose, weak, fumbly. The fork seemed immaterial until he managed to put a finger on it. “Whassup here.” Tines scraped across the concrete.
“Having trouble, pizza-man?” asked Red.
“Yeah, shit, somethin’ wrong with me.”
Whiskey must have been a little more powerful than I gave it credit for, Joel mused, wrapping a fist around the fork and picking it up.
Goddamn, but he was so exhausted. The kind of bone-tired exhausted when you got up early but you ain’t done nothin’ all day and you want to lay down at three in the afternoon and take a nap and sleep all day and not really eat anything and when you wake up you’re like what year is it—
He deposited the fork on the plate in his lap and rubbed his eyes. His fingers felt like they belonged to someone else and his head was half-full of water, spinning and swaying as he tried to get a fix on Red’s face.
“I think … I think I drank too much.”
“Maybe. This stuff is smooth. Sneaks up on you. Hey, why were you calling me ‘stepchild’ earlier?”
Joel waggled a handful of fingers at his own head, then at Red’s, then at his own again. “Cause the hair. Red hair. You know—what they say, whip you like a red-headed stepchild.”
“I see. You want to whip me?”
“Kinda. Maybe. Maybe you can whip me.” Joel lifted his plate in both hands and shimmied upward in his chair, trying to sit up straight. The remains of his dinner slid off into the floor, his fork ringing across the concrete again in a mess of potato-mush and bits of asparagus. “Shit.”
“I’ll get it,” said Red, putting his plate on the grill and rising from his chair.
“I got it, I got it.”
Leaning forward, Joel reached for the food to pick it up with his hand and put it back on the plate, but to his surprise the backyard, grass, rocks, and all pivoted up and hit him in the face.
16
Robin opened her eyes and realized she’d fallen asleep editing video. Her laptop was open in front of her, sitting on a piece of wood she’d scavenged from the garage downstairs. Bright moonlight fell at a slant through the giant floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the dark studio apartment with a soft blue-gray glow. For a few seconds, she thought she was back in Heinrich’s hidey-hole lair back in Hammertown. But instead of kung-fu posters and a desert, the walls were hung with impressionist paintings and the windows looked out on a red-brick wall, the back of a hardware store.
On the nightstand by the bed, a digital clock with burning red numbers said it was half past three in the morning. Robin stretched luxuriously, enjoying the feeling of the fleece blankets and flannel sheets against her skin. First time in ages she’d been able to sleep without nightmares. She felt like a million bucks, even if it was the middle of the night.
Kenway slept on one of the benches, cushioned by an array of throw pillows, a vague form under a too-thin blanket, traced by the flickering light of the TV.
She briefly entertained the idea of coaxing him into the bed, but let the thought fade. Rolling out of bed, she searched underneath it and discovered cabinets, and inside them she found a quilt. She took it over to the bench and unfolded it over Kenway, draping it over his supine form. He slept in his jeans, with his fingers interlaced over his belly in a very self-satisfied Winnie the Pooh way, his prosthetic leg removed and standing vigil next to him. He didn’t snore, but every time he exhaled, he blew it through his lips with a pewwww, pewww sound. Robin chuckled to herself as she tucked the quilt in around him.
A cane lay across the coffee table, alongside a matte-black handgun. She bent forward to peer at it in the low light and saw a magazine pressed into the magazine well. The safety was on.
Wandering over to the huge floor-to-ceiling window, she stood by the cold glass and studied the alleyway below, hugging herself against the chill. The stars above were a shotgun-blast of diamonds on a cape of indigo velvet. The alleyway was a bottomless black canyon, featureless, abyssal.
No one lurked out there in the darkness, as far as she could tell, but that didn’t banish the feeling of being watched.
An immense stage curtain hung from the ceiling by the window. She felt around the edge of the heavy fabric and found a rope. Creeping across the room, she did her best to quietly pull the curtain closed, and somewhere in the corner, a pulley rattled and squeaked softly, feeding her rope until the window was covered.
Without the moonlight or the city-glow, the apartment was engulfed in nothingness, cut only by the red numerals of the alarm clock. She tiptoed back to bed and slid under the covers again, the sheets silky and warm against her heels. Her face sank into the pillow and her body seemed to collapse in on itself, her muscles relaxing.
Sleep claimed her almost immediately.
The tree dream.
Again, she sat at the breakfast table with her mother Annie. For some reason, this time it was the dead of night.
Solid shadow rested heavily against the kitchen windows, twisting what was usually a warm, comforting memory into a sinister mutant version of itself. The only light in the kitchen was an electric green phosphorescence coming from the digital numerals on the microwave clock, turning her childhood kitchen into some secret dream-room of shadows and emerald chrome.
“You know there ain’t no talk of magic in this house, ma’am.” Annie folded her newspaper and set it aside, cradling long-cold coffee in both hands. Her voice was a soft, furtive mutter, as if she were trying not to be overheard. “Magic is wrong. Magic goes against God. And in this house, God’s rules come before man’s now. We been over this.”
“Yes, Mama.” Regardless of the dreadful, nonsensical darkness, Robin had already forgotten it was a dream, in that irresistible way our minds always convince us the impossible is real.
“You’re more than welcome to read your Harry Potter book, but I won’t have any talk about magic. Okay?”
“Okay, Mama.”
“A book is just a book. It ain’t real.”
Dream-Robin sucked on her lip for a moment. She summoned a little courage and asked, “If magic ain’t real, why does God not want it in our house?”
Annie gave her that exasperated don’t-be-a-dummy scowl from under her eyebrows. “I didn’t say magic wasn’t real. I was saying Harry Potter isn’t real. You can read them as long as you understand the difference between reality and fiction. Harry does ‘good magic,’ and that’s okay—he’s a good little boy—but in real life, good magic doesn’t exist. In real life, honey, all magic is bad.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Found you, said a low voice from the hallway.
The floor creaked under their feet, and something heavy and hulking stood right behind Robin. In her dream-form, a willowy waif-child not even in the throes of puberty, the thing behind her chair seemed exponentially larger than she’d ever known it before.
Hot breath breezed over her ear. Rotting meat and the astringent scent of star anise assaulted her nostrils. I’ve been looking for you for so long.
Welcome home.
Flies buzzed on her mother’s face.
Robin awoke in a panic, heart fighting the inside of her rib cage. When she opened her eyes, the bed was frosted in the same sick green glow.
White vapor curled from her mouth. The room seemed as if it were ten, twenty degrees colder, as if the heat had been sucked out and replaced by the vacuum of outer space. Even the bed was cold, under the blankets, and n
ot like the coolness of its untouched perimeters, but a frigid January chill that burned like naked steel against her bare skin.
Slowly, she turned to look over her shoulder, and found herself face to face with the huge window curtain. The green glow came from behind it, shining straight through the rough screen of heavy burlap, lighting the whole thing up.
No. Not again. Robin lay in the cold bed, staring, terror pushing acid up her throat. He’s back there, hiding, watching me, grinning again.
He’s not a hallucination, is he?
The only way she was going to stop this and find some path back to sleep would be to confront this waking nightmare. She was going to have to dispel the vision by meeting it head-on—the only thing that ever worked to make the creature go away.
The creature. Why don’t you call him what he is? she thought, shivering. That man in Alabama knew his name. Your mother knew who he is.
He’s come looking for you again.
He was waiting.
And in the end, after the therapy and pills, turns out it was never mental illness at all. Just like everything else about you, everything else you’ve done in your adult life, the “fictional” YouTube videos, your rapier wit, your road-warrior wardrobe, it was smoke and mirrors, duct tape and paper clips rigged up to hide the truth. From everybody, including yourself.
She reached out with a shaking hand and clutched the edge of the curtain, hoping she wouldn’t have to see the magician’s secret on the other side. It’s not a curse from some raggedy-ass witch in a backwater Alabama shithole, either.
She pulled it aside. Metal rings scraped somewhere high above with a tambourine sibilance, revealing the source of the light.
It’s not a brain tumor causing your frontal lobe to short-circuit.
Two huge green eyes stared down at her from a massive head. The Red Lord stood over her, with muscular orangutan arms and crooked canine legs with too many joints. Shaggy hair covered it in a pelt of flame-red, moss-green, ink-black.
No, he’s real. As real as the nose on your face.
