Black Leg

by Glen Hirshberg

  Otherwise, I just heard silence. The suburb-built-on-desert kind, suspended over fifty-mile sidewalks next to deserted malls.

  As I crossed the lot, a cop car passed, but on my side of the street this time. I don’t know what made seeing it so alarming, but I almost dove back into my own car. If I’d done so, I think I might also have hid.

  Why? No idea. I couldn’t see the officer through the vehicle’s darkened windows, and anyway, I was probably a football field away from the street. Maybe the cop didn’t see me. Maybe I looked like even less of a threat than I felt, to anything or anyone anywhere.

  The cop car passed. I shouldered my GoPro, and with no particular apprehension, no specific feeling at all except a wave of exhaustion, stepped over the little curb, out of the parking lot and into the mall.

  For the next … I don’t actually know how long, but I was back in my car, fleeing and weeping, by two twenty. So. Thirty minutes? Less? All I did in the time I spent there was walk the mall. The Market Circle Business Centre ran all the way down the middle of it like some sort of breakwater—breakair—and so I wandered around it, looking for a way in, or lights, or a door on which to knock. I flicked on the GoPro a couple times and filmed my shoes.

  More than anything, I felt like I was traversing a soundstage. Or downtown Disney. Some places—schools, office complexes, even other malls—feel eerie with no one in them, because it always feels like there should be someone in them, right? Or has been, moments before. But these Southern California sidewalk worlds … they feel eerie because the thousands of people who pass through them leave no trace. The sidewalks are always spotless, the windows free of fingerprints. The buildings don’t even feel anchored to the land. More like something assembled on Minecraft and projected. About as suggestive of current, active habitation as flags on the moon.

  At one point, passing a shuttered Ann Taylor outlet, I took a turn around the back of the Business Centre, and the actual moon blazed down on me like a lighthouse beam. It hung there, seemingly right at the end of this row of shops, gigantic, ridiculous. As fake as everything else in Santa Clarita. An emoji moon pasted onto what passed out there for blackness.

  I almost returned to my car. I felt ridiculous. Instead, I pointed my GoPro straight into the light and kept going, figuring sooner or later I’d find a door to knock on, a way into the Business Centre. When I lowered my camera, I glanced right, wanting a glimpse of my own reflection in the window glass just to confirm I was actually there, and saw a woman.

  She was just standing in the center aisle of the Foot Locker outlet, which wasn’t dark, had to have had at least some lights on. She was old, or older: white curly hair, pince-nez, some kind of dark-colored necklace that seemed to trap light more than reflect it. The little beads weren’t uniform, looked mottled or cracked.

  Like beetle shells, I remember thinking as I passed. I didn’t stop moving, barely had time to process. But somehow, I noted the necklace. And the way the woman had her arms folded across her chest. She was holding a pair of blue Skechers. Also, she was crying.

  It didn’t even seem strange. Not right away. Why shouldn’t she be in there, straightening, restocking?

  In a beetle necklace. Crying.

  I glanced back in her direction. Just as I did, the store lights went out. In the instant after I saw her face, which was right at the window, pressed hard against the glass so her nose slid sideways.

  That stopped me. Held me pinned to that placeless place.

  I laughed.

  “And right behind me, one of the classroom doors? It opened …”

  Turning my attention back to Business Centre, I focused again on finding an entrance. Eventually I did, around the far side, where this wing of shops emptied into yet another acre of parking lot: one door, heavy, metallic, and locked.

  Had I seen even a single window in the Business Centre before then? Why not? What could the dedicated workers who presumably staffed this place possibly be doing in there, and why do it in the middle of the mall?

  There was a moment, right around then, when I thought I might have stumbled onto something. A film the Kickstarter crowd might actually fund, and incidentally get my tent city project out of post-production in the process.

  I knocked on the door.

  Desert breeze kicked up, surprisingly strong, whipping across me and into the mall behind me. Past the Foot Locker outlet. In my mind—only in my mind, I did not see this—the old woman lifted away, tumbling over the sidewalks and out of sight like a plastic bag.

  The second time I knocked, I got an answer. From behind me.

  I don’t even remember the sound, couldn’t begin to tell you what it was, am not even sure there was sound; it could have been vibration underground. A temblor, they happen all the time out there, never really stop, as though the whole planet has Parkinson’s, is slowly shuddering itself and us to pieces.

  So maybe I just felt, didn’t hear. Maybe it wasn’t in response to my knock at all.

  Whatever. I was too busy whirling, fumbling my GoPro up to my face and turning it on—from protective instinct, not directorial—and so I saw what I saw through the lens.

  I’ve played the footage back a thousand times since then. I still can’t say. Neither can anyone I’ve shown it to. Is that a dragonfly passing? Wrong-color hummingbird? What you see is what I saw: a streak of black in the air, right at eye level, like a smear on the lens itself.

  Or a contrail.

  Behind me, the door knocked.

  Real sound, not vibration; I definitely heard it. I didn’t whirl—I’ll admit it, was afraid to, scared I’d find old woman face pressing right into mine with her breath in my nose, in my mouth—but I turned. Slowly. Lowering the GoPro, mostly because I’d lost my sense of how close I was to the door and didn’t want to bang it.

  The door banged. Much louder. Four knocks, rapid-fire, rat-a-tat-tat.

  I did what you do when someone knocks, what instinct and civilization has trained us to do: I reached out my hand. Right before I touched metal, the door drummed. Pound-pound-pound, double-fisted, surely. I kept expecting the metal to shudder in its frame, but it was heavy, thick, gave no visible sign.

  Hoisting the GoPro again, I got it almost to my face, felt more than saw movement to my left, darted my eyes that direction.

  She was maybe fifteen feet away. The woman with the necklace. Except it was a different woman. Same necklace, totally different person. Young, black hair in a ponytail, blouse and shiny shirt-vest bright pink. Skechers blue, and on her feet. Less Ringu monster than K-pop star. At least until the necklace twitched. Shuddered to life all at once, like plugged-in Christmas lights. The shells sprouted legs.

  The moon switched off.

  I wasn’t consciously filming, wasn’t even thinking, just recording sensation in my brain. But where did the light come from? How did I see the coyote?

  They’re fair questions. I can’t answer them.

  It loped out of the Restrooms corridor right at the end of the mall across the sidewalk from me. It didn’t trot toward the woman, didn’t yip or bare its teeth. It just stood, working its mangy mouth, which dripped. The least surprising living thing there, really. Assuming it was living. And actually there.

  Wind whipped up again, too hot for the night, hotter than the air should have been, and it reeked. Dead skunk. Breath mint. Old orange.

  I wasn’t thinking any of those things, then. They’re what I’ve pieced together since. Or, right, maybe invented. When I’m in comfort-myself mode, I decide I invented it.

  Because otherwise, that reek was combined breath: The coyote’s; the woman’s/women’s; and her beetles’.

  The ground buzzed like a cell phone receiving messages Or a million seventeen-year locusts erupting out of the Earth all at once. I looked down, staggered sideways. The coyote humped up, slunk to its left, but closer. Circling me. Hemming me in. Or herding me toward the woman, who’d gone old again, though still in the K-pop vest. Her necklace seethed on he
r collarbone like crabs on rock.

  Or one big crab.

  I turned to run, wasn’t even considering which direction, and finally noticed the Business Centre door.

  The open door.

  Everything stopped. It was pitch black inside, or at least I thought so at first. In retrospect, though, that moment was like the first glance up past streetlights into night sky. It takes a while. What we like to call stars coming out is really just our eyes adjusting. Finally seeing what’s there.

  Still. There definitely weren’t any lights on inside. Just a hallway, long and shadowed. Doors took shape, all of them windowless, all of them closed. A water fountain. And then, way down at the end—or not the end, maybe just at the lip of even darker shadows—I spotted my guy. Bulan.

  Even in the jury assembly room, even while he was talking, I’d barely bothered to look at his face. I recognized him now by his slump. The fit of his uniform shirt. Same one, I was sure. He had a flashlight in one hand, not switched on. Half-peeled banana in the other.

  Did he recognize me? Even today, I wonder. Do they allow him recognition?

  In the most mournful, pathetic way—as though at the window of a plunging plane—he lifted the banana and waved.

  I stepped into the Business Centre, started forward, and a curl of shadow, like a stray black hair, rose out of his collar and burrowed along his neck. The shadow had bristles. A spider leg. Beetle leg. Same as the legs sprouting from the old woman’s shell necklace, seething in place rather than crawling.

  Not beetles, I realized. Not crabs.

  Ticks.

  Somehow, I kept myself moving forward. At least until I saw the rest of them:

  Streaks of black filled the air between us. A woman—that woman? One of them? Both?—shimmered into existence, blinked out, blazed back again. The coyote appeared—just its mouth, then its tail, its slinky shoulders—hovering. Hunching in place. There/not-there/there. All of it swirling maybe halfway down the hall like an eddy in a river, with more black streaks radiating from it, swirling off it like mist. Right before the whole thing balled together—coiled—I realized it wasn’t like a river at all. It was too contained. Too intentional.

  More of a moat.

  It exploded toward me. Coyote/women/bristle-shadow legs, and I dropped the GoPro, stumbled, grabbed the GoPro, and ran.

  Left Bulan there. Ran.

  Not because I’m a coward. Not only. They weren’t … after him. Or they already had him. To the extent I thought anything, that’s what I thought.

  I think it still.

  I wonder if he even saw them. If, for him, it was always more like looking up from the bottom of a pool. Seeing lights flicker. Hearing pings.

  I don’t remember sprinting to my car. I don’t remember wind, light, sound, shaking earth, anything. I don’t remember the drive. Somehow, I wound up on my step-aunt’s porch up in The Oaks, clutching the cocoa she’d made me, babbling at her as she sat in her robe and bare feet on her porch swing and stared out at the identical houses across the way and around her. At some point, for some reason, I heard myself talking about my uncle, who’d refused morphine all the way to the end, and died screaming so loudly that we could hear him all the way down in the family waiting area. I was describing winces and tears on nurse’s faces. One nurse in particular, a young one, Elysia, who’d always smiled at my step-aunt and put a hand on her shoulder.

  I didn’t know about the Diwata yet. I learned about them later, on one of those days when this all resurfaced. By then, I’d given up trying to find Bulan—he’d quit, I’d been told, vanished, no one even seemed to have a record of his last name—and instead just rooted around hopelessly on the internet. The Diwata are Filipino fairies. Or a Tagalog name, anyway, for fairies who spirit you away. Claim you for their own. Won’t let you leave.

  Were they what I saw? How would I even begin to know?

  The only thing I know is Bulan’s raised hand, holding banana. Those slumped shoulders. The prosecution wishes to thank and excuse. My lonely step-aunt, and that nurse touching her shoulder. The people and moments that attach to us as we pass like ticks, burrow in, make us sick, separate us, but also, just maybe, form the only reliable bridge we’ll ever have between ourselves and anyone else. Their hard shells the path we traverse on our way through woods we all walk to someone else’s porch, so we can sit and tell the story of how we got there.

  About the Author

  GLEN HIRSHBERG received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Best Fiction, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was a Literary Guild Featured Selection. His collection, The Two Sams, won three International Horror Guild Awards and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Hirshberg has won the Shirley Jackson Award and been a finalist for the World Fantasy and the Bram Stoker Awards. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2021 by Glen Hirshberg

  Art copyright © 2021 by Robert Hunt