The John Maclay

by John Maclay

  He paused, while her mouth fell open. “I escaped once. But now I have to go to it, and solve this thing, alone.”

  Kate got up and, crying, left the room.

  Late that night, Ron forced himself to walk out into the yard. The air was warm, but the chill remained in his soul. He didn’t know what he meant to do anymore, whether it was to identify the monster, face his fear, or give himself over to it.

  And courage wasn’t even a factor. He was beyond that, and beyond everything.

  He knelt at the edge of the hole. He stretched out his hand, his wounded hand, and touched the gravel. He moved his fingers forward to where the hollow place was.

  He was seeking healing, he tried to think. But what he found was something else entirely.

  There was something in life, he suddenly knew, that sucked certain people into horror. That began as innocuously as a rotted tree stump in one’s back yard. That only fed on lesser beings, but that infected, and then consumed, a human, in a different way.

  In the next few, amazing moments, Ron gave himself over to his fate. As if recognizing his resignation, the thing no longer bit, but only ate. First his hand, and then his arm was drawn into the hole and down one of the tunnels. He felt a coolness and a mystery he’d never experienced before.

  Then, when his shoulder and his head were pulled in, he saw it. Just as it hadn’t been hot, it didn’t flicker with the flames of Hell. Instead, it was brown and murky like the earth.

  It kept sucking him, whether it was the earth, or Hell, or the embodied monster he’d thought it to be. His torso was engulfed, leaving only his legs to kick above the surface. Then they, too, were gone, and so was he.

  Inside, he knew his bones would never be disgorged. That was because there were others, as he now was, there, fully-fleshed shapes moving in a low-ceilinged darkness. Some might wear angel’s wings, but this was his destiny.

  The hole had been calling to him, all along.

  Kate sold the house and moved away. She told the neighbors Ron had disappeared, explaining him as an abandoning husband. But, while she didn’t excavate, she sensed where he might be.

  The new owners looked curiously at the hole in the back yard, especially the apparent attempt to fill it and the wide gap that remained. They brought in more dirt and gravel, but still there was some sinking.

  From time to time, Ron came up to eat a bird or a squirrel. He tried not to be obvious about it, so as not to attract undue attention.

  During the years and decades that followed, though, he identified an occasional person above who was akin to himself and the others below. Someone who’d be receptive, or damned, or as he had to think, enlightened.

  Then, he was obvious. Then, he enticed and sucked that person in to join them.

  They moved through the root tunnels and the earth to new locations. And wherever a tree was cut down, or perhaps an excavation for a new house made, they waited to appear.

  WHO WALKS AT NIGHT

  It was six months ago, about the time I turned forty, that I began to have the dreams.

  I didn’t really want them, or need them. You see, life had been pretty good to me, and I liked to think I’d already fulfilled a lot of the dreams I’d had when I started out. My own business, for example: I’d built it from a one-man operation to four locations and two dozen employees. A family: Mark and Judy were doing well in high school, and Ann was still the slim, attractive girl I’d married twenty years before. And the comforts: my big Colonial in a good suburb, my Mercedes, my country club.

  All of this I had. But apparently, it wasn’t enough. There was, I guess, some need in me that hadn’t been met, some hidden, rebellious thing. Because…

  The first dreams were innocent enough. In them, even though I’d spent a busy day before dropping off to sleep, I’d be working—back in the old times, when things weren’t so sure. On the street, in my cheap suit, making deals, feeling great when I succeeded. Returning home to Ann in the small apartment, and telling her about it. Then going out again the next morning, the whole world looking bright and free.

  I was able to enjoy these dreams, to think of them as my mind’s way of keeping things fresh for me, keeping the edge on. But about the next ones, I wasn’t so sure. You see, Ann and I still had a great thing going, even in bed, and…

  I’d be chasing nubile young women in my head, like Dagwood in the old cartoon strip. Or getting it on with girls I’d known years before, as I hadn’t quite, not then. Or even meeting strange women under streetlights downtown, and going with them to cheap hotel rooms for nights of rough, coarse sex. And, though I’d apparently sleep peacefully through it—I’d ask Ann the next morning—it seemed so real.

  So real—like the deal-making dreams, too, I was forced to admit—that I began to wonder if I wasn’t losing my mind. That I even began to search my memory to try to find out if I had, recently, done some old-fashioned business, or taken up with some ladies of the night and forgotten it; perhaps these were memories, instead of dreams.

  Then one Saturday morning, after some particularly vivid ones, I laid it all out for Ann. Yet when I finished, she just gave me a big hug.

  “You’re all right, tiger,” she said, nuzzling me. “You’re just getting to be an older, furry tiger. Who wants to know he’s still with it, in all departments. Well, let me tell you,” she finished, holding me even tighter, “you are.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure.

  And that night I had the first unsettling one.

  …I was downtown again, but it was different. Where in the other dreams I’d been more or less myself, now I was something else. Rough clothes, a tough walk—but above all, a feeling, of being out, of being alienated from the tall glass buildings, the well-dressed people I passed. And yet, of being at home in this night-world, as they were not—and as such, drawing from it the primitive strength to fight back.

  I went—in the dream—into a little show bar on a side street and ordered a beer, reaching into my jeans to pull out a crumpled dollar bill and pay for it. Then, like the calculating animal I was, I looked around…and my eyes settled on them. The young couple, obviously slumming; the woman tall, winsome, the man orderly, well-dressed—as I’d been. I turned away, and for a long time, feigning disinterest, just sipped at my beer. But then it was time. Because…they were getting up to go.

  Outside in the cool air I followed them, slipping in and out of doorways with practiced skill. And when the right moment came—when there was no one else around and I was sure the young pair hadn’t noticed me—I sprang.

  “Gimme your money,” I hissed, grabbing the woman around the throat and laying the knife—where had it come from?—under her breast.

  The man turned white, knees visibly buckling. “Yes…yes…don’t…hurt!” he forced out, fumbling in his pocket and throwing his wallet down. But the woman, paralyzed by fear, still held onto her purse.

  “Drop it!” I grunted into her ear, pulling her closer and poking her with the knife, feeling her firm behind against me. She let out a long sigh, and did.

  Then it was time to move. Like a cat, I scrambled, scooping up their stuff from the sidewalk as I waved the knife in the air, then bounding off smoothly, noiselessly, always avoiding the light, seeking the shadows that were my home. And after only a few blocks I was already safe, the contents of their pocketbooks—the two hundred-odd dollars in cash, the salable credit cards—processed efficiently, as I ran, into my faded jacket, and the rest thrown away.

  As I caught my breath in a doorway, I smiled: at how easy it had been; the man’s weak cry of “Police!” a moment after I disappeared had seemed to hang, feeble and mocking, in the night air.

  And I also remembered…how the young woman’s body had felt on mine. If I’d tried to, uh, I thought triumphantly, he couldn’t have done a goddam thing.

  …In the morni
ng, Ann said I looked tired—as if I’d had a rough night. But though I may have been tired, I went through the whole day—the small administrative details of my business—easily and cheerfully. And with, I know, not a bit of embarrassment or shame. Because, you see, I’d remembered the whole dream, its reality…but with anticipation! And that night I went to bed early.

  …It was continued, as I’d hoped it would be. The time period being next night, too—and as my other self. As I walked through the city, I recalled with satisfaction the fencing of the stolen credit cards—deals, my “real” self reflected—and the two first-rate meals I’d had, with all the extra cash. The haircut and shave—and, as I looked down, the new shoes, with thick soles that would make my footsteps even more soundless. Also—and it felt so good, so beautiful in my pocket—the gun.

  Now I was reentering the show bar, with its soft lights, its half-clad women on the stage. Flush, this time, with newfound wealth: no longer consigned to sit at the bar, nurse a beer, and fantasize, but able to walk right up to the tall, full-figured one I’d ached for, flash a fifty-dollar bill, and wait for her to come with me. To the cheap hotel room I’d rented—in which, after I enjoyed her body thoroughly, I collapsed into the best sleep I’d known in weeks.

  …“Gee, tiger, you were restless!”—Ann’s voice, the next morning, after I’d risen, almost in a trance. I waited for her next words, half fearing what they would be. “I even thought…you got up, walked around. Though you were still…”

  But as I dressed, and set off on my routine, waking day, her words strangely didn’t bother me…because they were only a confirmation of what I’d begun to believe was true.

  …The next night—when I awoke—it was twilight. I remember wondering about time frames: how it was always night, when I “slept,” yet could be other times of day, in the “dreams.” But it didn’t really matter, because again I was there, I was him. Walking the downtown street, inconspicuous, unnoticed by the people going home from their office jobs. But with something, I quickly sensed, inside me: a thing planned out with animal cunning, a thing which accounted for the nervous anticipation, yet powerful exhilaration, I felt now. Something new, something big. And as I went, apparently, to my destination, any guilt, any repression I may have felt—I may have felt, my “other” self was able to reflect—was finally gone. Because I was ready for the win. The kill.

  The plate-glass window, on the side street, said LOANS. I recognized it at once, as if I had passed it, even checked it out, the office inside, several times before. I would have, I knew. So now all I had to do was simple. Put my hand on the brass latch on the door, open it, go in. Turn the bolt with a flick of the wrist, lock the door behind me. Reach for the long cord, drop the venetian blind over the big window. Sealing myself, and the staff, inside: not just the office, but also my rampant ego, my wonderfully criminal mind.

  Triumphantly, I pulled out the gun.

  “Don’t. Move.” I said, as if I were in a gangster movie, but it was real. And I took a moment to look at them, as they stood frozen, trembling, blank expressions on their faces. The balding manager in a gray suit, the young accountant in shirtsleeves…and the girl, the young, slender thing in the soft, form-fitting dress.

  And suddenly, diabolically, the several dreams came together.

  It was with a wonderful power that I walked around the counter and grabbed her from behind—my arm around her breasts, the other hand poking the gun in her ribs—and made my ultimate deal.

  “All the money.” I ordered. “In a bag. Or else!”

  The old and the young man complied, moving around the office shakily, stumbling over things in their terrified haste. But at length they had it ready.

  “H-here,” the manager gasped, handing it to me. “Now…please g-go!”

  But it was then…that I smiled, as before.

  “Not yet,” I said. “You see, I lied.”

  And with the two men watching in horror, I lifted the woman’s dress, and…

  …I was struggling to awake, in my own bed at home; struggling to escape, once and for all, this thing that had happened to me—and which had now assumed such devastating proportions, which I knew at last I didn’t want. And finally, as I became conscious of myself—my real self, I hoped to God—lying there in a sweat, I made it back.

  But the next morning, Ann looked at me strangely.

  “Golly, honey!” she called from the bathroom as I dragged myself, physically and mentally exhausted, out of bed. “You sure did have a dream last night. And when I reached over to wake you, I thought…you were gone!”

  I tried to dismiss it; I really did. Went calmly out to work; got through my day with what, as I finally read in the eyes of my secretary, was an insane calm. One in which I was trying, and failing, to tell myself that I couldn’t have lived my nightmare. Couldn’t have really…moved outside my body…and done what I had.

  But I finally knew it was all a pose. And so, with an unreal smile—a condemned man’s smile, I thought sickly—I drove home.

  Knowing—as I took one last look at the bright day, at sweet “reality”—exactly what I’d find.

  There was only one police cruiser parked in front of the house; I’d expected more.

  “Honey!” Ann said at the door, her face strained—and I eternally regretted that this thing, this anomaly, wherever in the world it had come from, had had to involve her. “These officers…they want to know…”

  The policemen were young, crisply dressed, and obviously ill at ease at having had to come here, to this unlikely setting. But, to their credit, they had the facts.

  “Descriptions,” one of them mumbled, over the banal coffee Ann had apparently given them. “And you had your photo in your business ad. Must be some mistake, but you’ll have to come with us.”

  And in the line-up downtown, as I smiled my now-frozen smile, they faced me: the trendy couple from the bar, the ones from the loan office, the women…and a few more I hadn’t even remembered.

  Nodding in damning, righteous agreement.

  “That’s the man!”

  THE GREEN GLASS BOTTLE

  The building was as gray as the city street upon which it stood. Its corniced brick front had been painted gray, but the city dust, and the exhaust fumes from the heavy traffic which rolled past, shaking its foundations, would have made it gray. The whole neighborhood was one of grayness: an old commercial street, bypassed by the new developments near the harbor; left to storefront soup kitchens, obscure, struggling shops, and frequent FOR SALE signs…like the one on Number 708.

  It was winter, and it was raining. The young man moved his old gray car, stop-and-start, down the black river of the street, past the old candy factory, the stonecutter’s, and the used book store. He had been reading all night, and the world outside was dreamlike, somewhat removed by his sleepy eyes, and removed by the glass of the windshield, similarly water-clouded; focused only intermittently by the action of the wipers and his own efforts to keep awake. But the soporific rhythms of these activities also conspired to nudge his mind back inside the car, inside himself, into dream.

  He found a parking place, and emerged from the car into reality, feeling it, even though it was colored, gray, by his own romantic vision of the old city gleaned from some dangerous reading of 19th-century authors, dangerous if one wanted to be a modern man. The cold air was real, and the rain was real; he felt it on the tweed shoulders of his old gray jacket, at the same time realizing the gray and feeling a door open, like the car door, in his mind, then silently beseeching an unseen narrator’s indulgence, because all of it really was gray, even the sky, and life with all its complexity did in the end move to simple, even banal, fictional patterns.

  The eleven o’clock appointment was too early, considering his late night before, and the real estate man with his short brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses, practiced smile and dark blue raincoat was out of p
lace; he wasn’t gray. But the three-story shopfront, “The Building” as the young man had come to think of it ever since he’d answered the advertisement, looking for a place to fix up, he’d said, was still as promising as the faint light which now endeavored to shine through one of its grimy 1850s windowpanes, like a lamp-flare through a smoky glass chimney. “Number 708,” the man said noncommittally as he inserted a key and they went inside, the young man coming to the building, the building to the young man.

  It had been a woodworking shop then, after the old man’s death, an antique shop then, as the widow got old, a secondhand shop, a junk shop, then. She had lived over the shop for 65 years, half the building’s life, before going to the dust which was like that the young man now saw coating the well-worn but long untouched carpenter’s tools and the sample boards with their faded brass drawer pulls. But there were also piles of rags and newspapers, and telephone books from the 1920s, the dead names, in neat columns, of an earlier city, carrying with them the close, pungent smell of old lives, which the young man had never minded because something had given him a love of places asleep in the centuries as he was today, places old enough to be mythic, to extend backward and forward in time. Such places always seemed to hold the dustbins of men, as well as their spirits.

  The real estate man’s cleared throat broke into his reverie and suddenly informed him that his love was not shared, that he was browsing, and that they were there, at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday in December, now, for other purposes. But he permitted himself one last noncommercial gesture, a glance at a small painting which was the only decoration on a cracked gray wall: a faraway mountain lake, steep cliffs ending in dark depths. In dream, he suddenly moved into it, becoming for a moment the small, ancient figure in a sailboat of unfamiliar design which was now moving over the dim water, just as the floor beneath his own feet was beginning to move. He knew what book it had all come out of, in his memory, and that when he read that particular scene again he would envision it in terms of the painting and this gray day; magically moving in, making the three pasts of book, picture, and living mind his own. He turned to the business at hand.