by S. T. Joshi
The dark had never held any fears for me, even as a child. But now I felt like a child, sitting there afraid to get up and put on the light in case whatever was in the blackness seized its chance.
As the sweat cooled, I began to shiver. I gathered my courage and leapt out of bed suddenly to flick on the light. Those two short steps to the light switch seemed to take longer than anything I’d ever known.
There was nothing hiding in the dark. I went through to the kitchen to make some coffee.
I sat alone in the dark for a few hours, sipping coffee and wondering what on earth I was thinking in agreeing to come here. The old saying about there being no fool like an old fool had been proved agonizingly correct. I was just in the way.
Then there was the feeling that Kate knew something or was somehow drawn here. I had no idea what her game was, beyond the obvious one of having two men attending to her whims, but I determined to challenge her about it in the morning.
On returning to bed I eventually managed to drift off for a few fitful hours. They were mercifully free of dreams.
I WAS AWOKEN RUDELY BY ED BURSTING INTO MY room just after seven without knocking.
“She’s gone!” he yelled. It took me a few seconds to drain the last dregs of sleep and find my way to the waking world. The uneasy feelings left by my earlier dream still clung to me.
“Wha—? P’raps she’s just gone out for a walk,” I offered. Ed seemed convinced otherwise and kept shaking his head. “She was strange last night,” he said. Despite myself, I snorted in derision.
He continued: “She kept talking about the sea. And how she now knew what she had to do. I was so tired that I didn’t take any notice of it.”
As soon as I’d pulled some clothes on, we ran down the steep street at the back of the cottage. A kind of shared instinct told us where she’d gone. Above us, the perfect cloudless sky threatened to tilt forward, spilling out whatever lay behind it, to bury us forever.
When we reached the beach we stood panting, our gazes sweeping the sands for any sign of Kate. There was nothing, and I was unsure whether to feel panic or relief.
The sea was unusually calm, as if a storm had recently passed over. But if there had been a storm, it was unseen and unfelt by the inhabitants of the town.
I walked along the beach for a short distance, then stopped as I noticed something lying by a large rock. I called Ed over.
We looked down at the pathetic pile of fabric scraps for what seemed like several minutes, not wanting to acknowledge the awful implications. She was gone.
Then we saw the line of footprints that led across the beach. They struck me as strange, as if Kate had been moving in a manner other than her usual elegant gait. They stopped several yards short of the high-tide mark. It was as if she had suddenly jumped into mid-air, leaving no trace behind her. Or ascended heavenward like some ancient mystic.
Ed and I stood side by side on the shore, staring out at the secretive sea as it held its tongue. She was out there, we both knew it. She had to be.
I just hoped that she had changed, become “better” as she would have put it, because God help her if she hadn’t.
Weltschmerz
SAM GAFFORD
Sam Gafford is a fiction writer, literary critic, and publisher. His fiction has appeared in Black Wings and other venues, and his criticism in Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction, Crypt of Cthulhu, TAPS Magazine, and elsewhere. With S. T. Joshi, he has compiled a bibliography of William Hope Hodgson. He is working on a supernatural novel about Jack the Ripper and a critical study of Hodgson.
I WOKE UP ALIVE AGAIN TODAY.
Looking up at the bedroom ceiling, I silently cursed the fact that I hadn’t died in my sleep. I awoke to another day in the same hell as always: facing a lifetime of days to come exactly like this one. Scratching my head, I swung my feet out of bed onto that tan carpet I hated so much. I shut off my alarm, and the sound of Ann snoring filled the room. I looked over at my wife. As usual, the covers were over her head and she was just an amorphous blob.
It was the same as every morning had been for the last twenty years: I got up, shaved, took a shower (being careful not to use all the hot water). Gulped down a few bites of something; didn’t matter what it was. All done as quietly as possible. After I got dressed, I looked back at Ann. She was still asleep and snoring. Twenty years ago, I would have woken her up to kiss her goodbye. Now there didn’t seem to be much point.
It was a cold October morning and neither the car nor I liked it very much. The engine struggled to turn over, but it was an old car so that was just to be expected. We couldn’t afford to buy a new car, so I was stuck with one that was outdated ten years ago. I shifted it into gear and it started moving slowly. The cassette player had been broken for a while now, so I had to make do with the inane chatter of morning radio. From there, I parked at the usual commuter lot and took the bus into Providence.
Buses are unusual places. People thrown together for a short period of time tend to show their differences. Some, like myself, sit in stony quiet, anxious for the trip to end. Others become loud and boisterous, insistent upon being noticed and heard. On any given day, I can learn about any number of private lives through one-sided cellphone conversations. Love, sex, hate—all through a phone. And the homeless are either frighteningly silent or willing to debate politics with anyone who dares to disagree with them. I close my eyes and try to decipher where the bus is by the turns and movements. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I can pretty much tell where I am at any point on the ride from Warren to Providence. Sadly, this is often the highlight of my day.
Once the bus arrived at Kennedy Plaza, I avoided the traffic on my way to the Fleet Bank building. Once it was the Hospital Trust building. Before that, it used to be the Old Stone Bank building. I’ve come to realize that my life is marked by remembering where things used to be. Once inside, I signed in, took the elevator to the third floor, and punched my code into the keypad to open the door to the Dividends and Securities Department. I sat down at my desk, four rows down and two chairs to the left, and logged into the computer. I nodded a silent “good morning” to my fellow prisoners and opened up my work for the day.
My cubicle in hell is a clean one. All the files and printouts are in order in plastic holders on my desk. The desk drawers hold only what is needed. A few historical reports in cardboard covers take up the bottom drawer. The second holds my employee handbook. Updated every year and never opened otherwise. The small top drawer holds the few stationery items I use: pens, paper clips, tape, scissors, staples, and a few candy bars for the afternoon lag. On the top of my desk is only my computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone, and the plastic file holder. No photos. No doodads. No mementos. There’s no rule against them. Flexman, who sits in the desk behind me, has framed pictures of his wife, his kids, a “world’s greatest dad” award, a rock that he brought back from a beach in Hawaii, and a little plastic square that says “Jesus loves you, but I’m not Jesus.” I used to have a picture of Ann on my desk, but that was a long time ago.
I suppose cubicle is the wrong way to describe our situation. A “cubicle” suggests walls that separate every work station. We have no walls. There are rows of desks, set in pairs. From where I sat, I could see across the room in every direction. There were maybe twenty rows and six columns of desks. I never bothered to count them all. To the right, near the front of the room, were the two managers’ offices. They were the normal type of office one sees in a bank. Nothing particularly special, but they were made that way so that the inhabitants could be interchangeable. In the fifteen years since I’d been in that department, there had been five different people in those offices. It would take quite an effort for me to recall all their names.
The current manager was Tim Sympkof, who clearly saw the department as only a quick stop on the way to something better. He rarely bothered to talk to any of us and spent most of his days in his office, listening to one of those digital radios. The o
nly time Sympkof came out of his office was if any of the executives came into the room, which almost never happened. Most of the time, Sympkof left the running of the department to his assistant manager, Harry Helger, who’d probably been with the bank since the first account was opened. Harry was nice but essentially useless. He’d managed to keep his job by not making anyone mad and, basically, no one wanted his job anyway.
Through the years, the number of the people in the department wavered. When I first started, nearly every desk was full. Now, with the economic “downturn,” only about half the desks were being used. The work hadn’t decreased, only the number of people to do it.
My job was handling dividends. I tracked securities and verified who was holding what and how much they were due. It was tedious and laborious and mind-numbing. If anyone ever says that they love accounting, then you know you are dealing with a liar. No one loves accounting any more than anyone loves cleaning out toilets, but it’s something that needs to be done and it drives every aspect of the economy. Still, you’ll never see a television commercial bragging about how exciting it is to be an accountant. There are no television shows about accountants solving crimes. Even truck driver school commercials look more exciting.
When I started, we still did everything by hand. Slowly, everything changed over to computers with new programs and e-mail and the like. I’d always been good with such things, so I picked them up pretty easily, which is probably how I managed to hold on to my job. All our computers were connected to the mainframe and we had access to e-mail and Internet, but we were constantly monitored. I could get around the spyware the bank put in but never bothered to. There wasn’t much I wanted to spend my time looking at. Flexman was different, though, so one afternoon I set up his computer so that he could surf the Web as much as he wanted without anyone knowing. I mainly did it so he’d stop talking to me so much. But, after I did that, he came to me with any computer problems… and he always seemed to be having problems.
“Hey, Doug,” he whispered to me, “my computer’s doing it again.”
I turned and looked at him and he pointed at his monitor.
Sighing, I stood up and went and looked. The screen had several pornographic sites open. “I told you to be careful what you looked at.”
Flexman laughed. He was a big man and his smile could take up half his face. The fact that he was black never made much difference to me. Black, white, Asian, whatever. We’re all just as pointless.
The computer was locked. Somewhere there was a virus trying to get through.
“I’m going to have to shut this down. You’re going to lose any work you had.”
He moved aside and I pressed the right buttons in the right order and the screen went black. Five seconds later, the Microsoft Windows logo came up. I bypassed the log-in and opened the programs. “There,” I said, “you should be all right now.”
“You da man, Doug! You got, like, a gift with computers. Why don’t you go into programming or something?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Go into the only other field that’s as boring as accounting? No, thanks!”
As I looked up from Flexman’s monitor, I could see there was a girl pushing a cart in the middle of the room. She was one of the “runners”: people who ‘run’ things from department to department that can’t be sent via e-mail. There aren’t as many of them as there used to be. She was thin and young. Maybe twenty-two at the most. Her hair was straight, shoulder-length, dark with a streak of bright red dyed in the front. Her lips and breasts were full, and I could have sworn she was looking at me. She threw a package in her cart and left the room.
“Who’s that?” Flexman said.
I went back to my seat. “Just some runner,” I said. “She’ll probably quit by the end of the month like they all do.” Punching my keyboard, I got back to work looking at the endless series of numbers.
AT LUNCHTIME, I LOGGED OFF MY COMPUTER AND headed to the cafeteria. Fleet was one of the few places I knew that still had a cafeteria for their employees, and almost everyone used it. Situated on the fourth floor, it took up a large area and was designed with large windows that looked out over Kennedy Plaza. The place was always crowded and table space was usually at a premium. I sat down in my usual place; table for two, near the back wall, in a corner away from the windows. Around me, the tables filled and people came and went. It was like high school all over again. The tellers ate with the tellers, the managers ate with the managers, departments grouped together, and there was not an executive in sight. They ate in their private dining room upstairs on the tenth floor with their own kitchen staff. I’d heard that the food there was much better than what we were given here.
I took out my lunch and started to eat. It was plain turkey on white bread. No lettuce, tomato, or mayo. A small bag of chips with a bottle of water and some baby carrots finished the meal. I never brought anything to read. I’d never be able to concentrate with all the noise around me, and I hated to start reading something knowing that I was on a time limit. Never was one for reading newspapers either.
“This seat taken?”
It took a second before I realized that someone was speaking to me. That never happened.
I looked up and it was the “runner” from before. She had a tray with something that pretended to be a hamburger but was probably more akin to a circle of cardboard. It was covered in cheese, lettuce, onions, pickles, and some oddly colored sauce. A tray of nachos was the side order and looked to have just about everything on it possible.
She was smiling and I could see that her nose had been pierced.
“Hello? Can I sit here? There’s no other seat available.”
I could see several seats empty behind her.
“Um… sure. If you like.”
“Thanks! Been a fucking long day already.”
She sat down and immediately began to eat. There was a certain amount of animalistic joy in the way she attacked her hamburger. “I’m Maya, by the way.”
I nodded. “I’m Doug. Doug Marsden.”
She was wearing a thin shirt with mid-length sleeves. It was warm out, so they had the air conditioning on full-blast. I could tell that she wasn’t wearing a bra as two points started to rise up under her shirt. There was a hint of tattoos on her arm.
“So what do you do here, Doug?”
“Me? I… I work in Dividends and Securities.”
She smiled. Her top lip turned up slightly. “Crap, that must be boring. How do you stand it?”
I nodded. “Well, you know, it’s a job.”
She scoffed. “I think I’d put a needle through my eye if I had to do that all day long.”
As she ate, I looked at her more closely. Her hair was dyed black except for the streak of red in front. I couldn’t tell if the red was her real hair color or not. Her ears were each pierced several times, and I unexpectedly caught myself wondering what else was pierced. Her eyes were green and her skin was soft and pink. Although not unhealthy, I doubted that she spent a lot of time in the sun. I think she caught me staring but didn’t say anything.
“And what do you do, Maya?”
“I just started in the mail department. I’m a runner, you know. It keeps me busy. But I’m really a musician!”
“Oh?” I asked.
“Yeah, got a few things up on YouTube, y’know? All my own songs and everything. Look me up under ‘Mayakeyes.’ I’m looking to get something going.”
I made a mental note for later and finished eating my sandwich.
Maya polished off her burger and started on her nachos.
“You don’t talk much, do you, Doug?” she asked.
I looked up, startled at the question.
“Uh, no, not too much.”
“That’s all right. I like the strong, silent type.”
She put her hand on mine. There was still cheese sauce on her fingers and I could feel it oozing between mine.
Near the windows, I could see a bunch of people from the mail room eati
ng their lunch. There were several empty chairs.
“Are you sure you don’t want to sit with your friends from your department?”
Maya looked over. “What? Them?” She scoffed and turned back to me. “Nah, they’re boring. Insignificant assholes, the bunch of them. They’re just too fucking stupid to realize it. But I’ve got a feeling about you, Doug, I think you get it. I can see it in your eyes.”
She lifted her hand up, tracing her finger along the edge of my hand, and stood up. Maya stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked off the cheese. “Gotta run. Same time tomorrow, Doug?”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked over to the trash and emptied her tray. She looked back at me and waved as she walked out of the room.
I sat there, feeling vaguely unsatisfied with the remainder of my lunch.
FOR THE REST OF THE DAY I STRUGGLED TO CONCENTRATE on my work. I found myself looking up every time someone came into the room.
On the bus home, I miscalculated my position three times.
As I walked through the door, my phone beeped at me annoyingly. Ann had sent a text saying that she had to go to a church meeting tonight and I’d be on my own for dinner. I threw a frozen pizza in the microwave and ate it in front of a television that I wasn’t watching anyway.
I sat down at the computer and tried to remember what Maya had said. I went to YouTube and typed in “Mayakeys,” but nothing came up. I was sure that I’d remembered it correctly, but maybe my spelling was off. Tentatively, I typed in “Mayakeyes” and waited.
Four videos came up. Two just had the words “Maya Keyes,” which told me virtually nothing. The other two looked to be homemade videos. One, I think, was in someone’s basement somewhere, while the other one looked to be filmed outside.
I clicked on the basement one and sound exploded out of the computer speakers. Loud, screeching sounds that could only be described as music by someone who had never heard any music before. I remembered punk music from when I was a kid, but this was beyond even that. Maya—I think it was Maya—was screaming and yelling and chanting and I couldn’t make out any words she said. It didn’t even sound like English. I heard words like “Ktooloo” and “Daygon,” but I couldn’t say that they were even words. Maya, for her part, just jumped around the basement, screeching and gyrating as if she was having a seizure. I wondered if Fleet Human Resources knew about this. Maya was the only one in the video, and I couldn’t tell if she was the one who filmed it as well.
