Aberrations of Reality

by Aaron J. French

  Malique wrestled himself free. “I ain’t no baby.”

  “He went in there,” Tio said, pointing to the doors.

  Tike took his attention away from Malique long enough to slug his brother in the arm. “I told you to quit that. You’re acting like a punk.”

  “But I saw him.”

  “Saw who?” Malique said.

  Tike answered for him. “Bitch-face here thinks he saw that Wilson kid’s ghost going into the building. He’s full of shit.”

  Malique’s blood went cold. “Really? You could see him?”

  Tio met his eyes. It was a hard stare. “You saw him too, didn’t you?”

  Malique, buckling under the intense pressure, nodded.

  “I knew it!” Tio rushed past and peered through the dark space in the double doors.

  “Where are you going?” Tike shouted.

  “I’m going in. I wanna see if that spook is real.”

  Despite the cold, Malique felt himself beginning to sweat. This is bad, he thought. If they go down there and see the cemetery, there’s no telling what they may do. They could cause some serious trouble.

  He didn’t want anyone knowing about the secret graveyard. It was his slice of the world that nobody could take from him.

  Tio suddenly vanished through the opening. Cursing, Tike followed. Malique had no choice. He had to make sure his cemetery was safe.

  He knew the way better than they did, so he stayed back, watching. He could hear them tripping over debris, cursing, arguing with each other. Several times they stopped and Tio called out for Toby; other times they both called for Malique. But he stuck to the shadows and they never spotted him.

  The air was so dark that Tike and Tio had to use their cell phones as flashlights as they made their way down the chipped concrete steps to the basement. Before long, the two brothers had located the hole in the west wall. They entered the vast high-ceilinged cavern, through which the sewage canal flowed on its way to the treatment center. Malique could hear them oohing and ahhing and complaining about the smell. He crouched in the shadows, waiting for them to cross over the rusty metal bridge. Then he went over.

  They were close. It was just up ahead, past the cave rooms with rocks poking through the floors and ceiling, just through the two salt-covered pillars, then under the archway of slippery-looking limestone, finally down the last section of crumbling steps, where a crack had formed in the rock ceiling letting in a single shaft of filtered sunlight. It was once an entryway for the sewer workers, but was no longer used.

  Malique decided it was time to reveal himself, so he stepped from the shadows into the sunlight.

  Tike’s face became a mask of terror. “Yo, man, are you crazy?”

  “I knew he was following us the whole time,” Tio said. “How come you didn’t say nuthin?”

  Malique shrugged.

  Tike struck him with a quick, straight jab in the shoulder, sending him back. “He didn’t say nuthin ’cause he’s a lil’ mama’s boy, always hiding under mama’s skirts.” He laughed and added, “Him and half the fools in Bayside.”

  “At least she ain’t no crackhead,” he replied.

  Tike’s eyes narrowed. Tio stepped beside him. Malique was cornered by a pair of jackals.

  Tike sent another half-thrown fist into Malique’s shoulder, rocking his upper body. “You got somethin’ to say about my mama?”

  Tio started punching his palm like an outfielder. Malique stayed quiet.

  “That’s what I thought,” Tike said, giving him a last little push. “Punks like you s’pposed to be seen and not heard, or else they get socked up.”

  The brothers turned in unison, and as they did their awareness of Malique seemed to wash away. They stepped through the jagged round hole punched in the limestone wall and entered the inner sanctum of the cemetery.

  Malique stepped through, quiet, observant. He felt anxious, and he wanted to get this over with.

  They don’t know anything, he told himself. They’re foolish and they think the world is one big joke, and it’s a bad joke, and they hate it. No wonder they want to destroy everything. They really don’t know any better.

  He sat down on a chunk of old granite, making himself invisible. He was good at this. It’s what he did at home when his mom had her boyfriends over. He looked at the ghosts now, spread across the walls of the secret cemetery, outlined in paint. The graffiti seemed to swirl and churn: reds, yellows, blacks, blues, silvers, and greens, all mixed together.

  He found it stunning, even though he didn’t know how it got there. Nobody knew about this place, and he’d never seen any evidence of taggers. It was like the ghosts themselves had done it, had made murals of themselves. The missing kids were depicted with striking realism, their black faces staring out from the walls.

  Tike said, “Yo, man, what is this shit?”

  Malique thought he meant the graffiti images of the missing children, but he looked at the boy and realized he meant the improvised gravestones. Malique had made them out of milk cartons, discarded brown sacks, fast food containers, empty bottles, and scraps of newspaper. He personalized each to fit the missing kids, had even set it in a “plot” and written the child’s name, along with the date.

  There were dozens of these jury-rigged graves scattered across the ground, ringed by the walls, where the graffiti ghosts stood frozen in time. This was their shrine. Malique had built it for them, he had blessed the area, consecrated it, and now everything was holy. To disrespect the sacred cemetery was sacrilege.

  “It’s a place where the dead rest,” Malique replied, “without being forgotten.”

  The walls suddenly began to creak and swell. Showers of rock piddled to the floor. The graffiti came swirling to life, moving along the concrete like multicolored serpents.

  “I told you I saw the dead kid!” Tio wailed. “This place is haunted!”

  Tike was looking, not at the supernatural phenomena around him, but directly at Malique, wearing an expression of pure hatred. “You’re a freak,” he said. “Aren’t you? Like that kid from The Sixth Sense.”

  “You’d better leave,” Malique replied.

  “You’re going to tell me what to do? I don’t think so. Let me show you what I think about your freak-o shit.”

  He moved to the nearest headstone, a McDonald’s bag filled with sand, ringed by several Coke cans with candles, and the name Jamal James written in black magic marker. He kicked it to ruins with his Nikes, scattering the sand.

  When he finished, he looked at Malique. “You see? You ain’t nuthin special. You sure as hell can’t tell me what to do.”

  He stepped to the next headstone, ready to kick it apart, but the walls of the chamber rumbled and groaned, and the graffiti swirled like an ocean tempest.

  “Stop it,” Malique said, rising to his feet. There was a horrible ache in his chest, a feeling of dreadful anger. “Just get out of here. We didn’t do anything to you.”

  Tio nodded. “He’s right, man, let’s go.”

  Tike chuckled. “If you come near me, boy,” he said. “I’ll make you sorry.” He stared him down with cruel, emotionless eyes, and Malique shrank into his Rocawear jacket, backing away.

  Tike swatted his brother. “And you. You’re gonna help me with this. I don’t want to hear any more of your bitch-talk about ghosts, got it?”

  Tio nodded.

  “Good. Let’s get this party started.”

  He brought his foot down on Sandy Mayer’s Budweiser box headstone, flattening it and kicking it aside. Tio approached the headstone nearest him, which belonged to Terrell Willow. It was a collection of empty beer bottles wrapped together with a shoelace. A piece of old cardstock bearing the boy’s initials was balanced between the bottlenecks.

  Tio closed his eyes, scattering the bottles like bowling pins. Broken glass flung across the floor. Tike glanced at his brother, pleased.

  They went at it together, destroying everything in sight. The chamber echoed with sound. M
alique cowered in the corner, hands over his ears. That feeling of anger and dread was growing inside him. He wanted to make them stop, to try and salvage his shrine, his wonderful creations, but he felt paralyzed. He was too scared. He wanted to disappear, to become invisible.

  His eyes drifted to the walls where the coiling ropes of graffiti seemed almost to reach out to him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he whimpered, snot bubbles forming in his nose.

  The brothers moved in a line toward the rear of the chamber, kicking apart the headstones as they went. The floor was littered with debris. Some of it lay glittering in the sunlight.

  They came to the final row, set up along the back wall, and stopped. Tio pointed. “Look, here’s that Toby kid’s grave.”

  They stood looking at the empty pizza box with the flap up, the assortment of pennies, dimes, and nickels sprinkled inside. Their awareness moved up the wall, to the graffiti image of the missing boy. Toby was wearing the red shirt and blue jeans he went missing in. Lines of color moved above his head, swimming, swirling. His eyes, two white holes with brown dots, gazed down condemningly.

  Tike lifted his right hand… and gave the image his middle finger. Then he bent over the empty pizza box, unzipped his fly, and urinated.

  Tio stumbled back. “You almost got piss on me!”

  Tike looked back over his shoulder, to where Malique was hunched in the shadows. “This is what I think about your cemetery,” he said, laughing.

  But Malique paid him no attention. His eyes were watching the image of Toby which now appeared to be growing, swelling, pressing out of the wall. Tio noticed it and he screamed, but it was too late. Toby’s ghostly image had come forth into reality, naked and sleek, a shimmering outline of paint and fuzziness. The image hovered above the ground.

  Tike turned, coming face-to-face with the apparition. The stream of urine coming from his midsection piddled out; he absently zipped himself up and stumbled back.

  “I told you this was a bad idea!” Tio yelled, as they raced toward the entrance. A swirling wall of graffiti moved before the opening, blocking their escape. More graffiti fanned out above their heads, hanging in the air.

  The brothers panicked, spun in circles, yelling at each other. Malique looked on from the shadows and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The ghosts are standing up for themselves, he thought, smiling. They’re making sure they won’t be forgotten.

  The other missing kids came forth from the walls, all naked, all gliding through the air, and surrounded the brothers. They closed in on them, bearing tides of paint, wrapping them up. They were being swallowed. The graffiti was taking them out of this world, subtracting them.

  “Hey, little freak-o!”

  It was Tike. He sounded different, frightened, more childlike.

  “Help us, call them off—please, do something!”

  Malique didn’t budge. He stayed right where he was, watching while the missing kids and the swirling graffiti closed over the brothers’ heads. The graffiti ghosts merged with the paint, until there was only one giant throbbing mass of color pressing the boys tighter in a strange multicolored dome.

  Malique shut his eyes as Tike and Tio started to scream.

  When he opened them, the chamber was back to normal. The graffiti swirls were back on the walls; the images of the missing children were back in place, affixed to the pitted concrete. A strew of rubbish and debris (formerly the headstones) lay scattered across the floor.

  Tike and Tio were gone.

  But that wasn’t true… not exactly. As Malique rose to his feet, he noticed a pair of new images on the wall. A shiver passed over him, and his arm hair stood up.

  Jesus Christ, it’s really them.

  Painted on the concrete, realistically depicted and lavishly colored, were Tike and Tio as they had appeared a moment ago. They wore the same clothes, and their faces looked out sadly.

  Malique suddenly pitied them. He sighed. They had gone on to join the other missing kids, never to return.

  He shook his head. Now they’ll be forgotten, too, just like all the rest.

  He glanced at the dust and debris littering the floor.

  Unless I do something about it.

  A wave of resolve swelled in his heart. He gave a little salute to the graffiti images of Tike and Tio, then bent and started gathering the remains of the headstones. He had a lot of work ahead of him.

  What Lay East, Lay West

  He’d been riding for several days when the grass, the stones, even the snake trails in the dirt and the cacti and the thorn bushes, the mesquite trees and the flowering Palo Verde—even the clouds in the sky and the blazing sun—everything pointed in one direction: east. Farther away from his wife and children, from the house he had built with his own two hands, from his role as the county sheriff. He had left all of it… and now the desert seemed to be pushing him onward—

  Get away, cried every stone, every gulch, every looming saguaro. Leave it all behind.

  But that was his way—to coast. He’d coasted out of his parents’ house at eighteen to go and work on the new railroad line. He coasted into his marriage with Isabel, coasted into having two baby girls (beautiful though they were), and into his law enforcement position.

  Then it had hit him: the emptiness and meaninglessness of his life and everything in it. That’s when the voices started, the Get outs, Go nows, and Leave it all behinds.

  He had tried ignoring the voices, but if there’s one thing he wasn’t, it was master over his own thoughts. He was driven into heated arguments with Isabel. Yeah, sure, and he even laid his hands on the little ones, and he roughed up a couple of fellas coming out of the saloon one night.

  I think the town wants to hate me, he thought morosely. They want a scapegoat, someone to throw stones at—the fools, after all I did for em. I upheld the law. I chased out that group of Apaches when they rolled into town. I cleared out the burly wayfarers who done raped several of the whores…

  He patted Fancy on the flank of her neck, then nudged her in the ribs with his boots. They started down the trail again. Sun stained the world and soaked him through with sweat. A granite landscape stretched in four directions. Not for the first time, he wished a hole to Hell would open in front of him so he could hurl himself down. If he could end this, there’d be no reason to travel east.

  There’d be no reason to do anything.

  * * *

  Night.

  He was good with fires. His father had taught him how to survive in the desert. They used to go on trips into the canyon when he was still a boy so they could sleep under the stars. Nothing but the two of them then.

  The flames tore at the night like exotic dragons dancing for some pagan Oriental god. He watched them, throwing on a fresh branch every so often. The rocks he’d set up around the outer rim steadily collected ash. Fancy was tied to a juniper tree, sleeping.

  He wondered if Isabel had realized he was gone by now. That was stupid; of course she had. He hadn’t come home for supper, and when was the last time he’d been absent at the dinner table? He was watching the smoke from his fire now, and which way did it drift? Why, no such way but east. Flames… like little orange arrows, pointing, pointing.

  What lay east?

  Meaning.

  The whole desert seemed to transmit it.

  He lay on his back in the sand, using his rucksack for a pillow. In no time he had fallen asleep.

  * * *

  Dreams were funny things. Couldn’t be trusted. However, he knew the Indians made a big deal of them. He remembered that time driving the Apaches out and listening to their medicine man talk about prophecy and spirits and dreams. Little Brown Jonathon from the general store had translated. Jonathon said the medicine man was there because the Apache chief—a larger fella on a pure bred—had dreamed about their town. In the dreams, his ancestors had instructed him to come.

  At the time he thought it funny, all the talking about dreams; queer was the word he used. But now he thought
maybe the Apaches were on to something, looking for the symbols in dreams to find answers, maybe even guidance. It made more sense to him now because wasn’t he going into the east based on pure intuition, pure hope, and wasn’t he always observing the signs in the desert?

  Was he crazy?

  He dreamed…

  * * *

  The world was made of fire and ice, spinning like a giant blue wheel in space, surrounded by the stars, the planets, and the sun. People like broken marionettes moved over the face of the Earth, arms linked, so many of them and it was clear they were involved in some task. The globe, meanwhile, churned in this infinite darkness, propelled round and round by the vile broken marionette-like people.

  He spun this way and that, viewing it from all angles, until he realized they were rowing, as a team of oarsmen in the belly of a ship, and the Earth was their vessel and stretching from the twin points of infinity flowed a red river filled with blood, misery, and pain.

  He recognized this as the river of suffering in which all unborn life was steeped, and out of it grew the beings who rowed the Earth like a ship. He looked closer and saw that flowers and plants, trees, bushes and vines sprouted up from the river, roots buried in the undulating waves. It made no sense to him, but it appeared that all life was brought forth from this river, this channel of blood and misery.

  He wept silently hanging invisible in the unknown darkness. Sometime later the light of morning spurned his consciousness back to life.

  * * *

  The fire had died down, nothing but smoldering coals now. The sun was low but the temperature was rising.

  After a quick meal of beans and bread and a quick toilet, he mounted Fancy and pointed her snout toward the mountains.

  For some time he observed the phenomenon of everything pointing east. The saguaros extended spiny fingers; barrel cactuses grew diagonally out of the ground, crowns pointing aslant; plenty of those mysterious snake trails formed into arrows; even the rocks jutting up seemed to lean that way, and the wind, too, blew at his back, hurrying him along.