Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Oh Jesus,” Nate said out loud, but keeping his voice low lest he draw the spidery figure’s notice. “Oh man, oh no, what is that?”

  The figure passed between the front of Nate’s car and the rear of the car ahead of him. There it stopped, and Nate’s heart slammed on its brakes in his chest when he saw the figure straighten up to its full towering height and face directly toward him—a silhouette in the bloody fog, skinny as a lengthy tree branch in the rough shape of a man.

  Static burst from the speakers of his sound system again. Nate jolted, saw that somehow the power light was back on. This time words came through the static, sounding like a computer’s synthetic voice: flat, lifeless, inhuman.

  “Mr. Forrester,” the voice half-buried in static said, addressing Nate by name. “We have a matter to discuss with you.”

  Nate didn’t speak. Maybe if he pretended not to hear the thing, it would go away. How well could it see him in here, through the restless shrouds of fog? His fists gripped the steering wheel more tightly. Could he spin the wheel, stomp the gas, veer over into the E-ZPass lane and escape the toll plaza? Was there enough room between the cars to do that, without hitting the silhouetted figure? Maybe he should hit the figure. He flicked his eyes to the rearview again. Was there sufficient space to back up a little, before he tried such a maneuver? Could the driver in back of him see this figure too, or did his car block it?

  Or might he be the only one capable of seeing it, because he was simply hallucinating the creature? Had he fallen asleep in his car while waiting for the driver ahead of him to pay his toll? Yes, a dream—a dream. Wake up, his mind screamed at itself, wake up, wake up . . .

  “Mr. Forrester,” the voice repeated, sounding exceedingly patient with its lack of intonation. “Are you listening?”

  “Please leave me alone,” Nate spoke up at last. His voice sounded to his own ears like that of a frightened child, close to tears. Pleading. He couldn’t even summon the strength to feign strength.

  “We’re afraid we can’t do that . . . you have been selected.”

  “Selected for what?” he blurted to the unwavering, seemingly faceless stick-figure.

  “A test.”

  “Who are you?” Nate demanded, in almost a hysterical screech. It was an alien, wasn’t it? An alien that meant to abduct him, subject him to some terrible examination or experimentation. A test, it had said.

  The figure ignored his question. “There is a choice you must make.”

  Nate could only groan.

  “Are you listening?” the voice droned again.

  “What kind of choice?” Nate whimpered.

  “There are occupants in the vehicles to the front and back of you. One occupant in each.”

  “Yes?” His voice quavered, unstable, as though it might unravel into incoherence . . . even as the figure’s voice had taken form from hissing chaos.

  “We have immobilized your three vehicles and the occupants within them—except for you. The other two are locked in the moment and are not privy to our conversation.”

  His car was immobilized? Nate shifted his foot from the brake to the gas and depressed it. His car remained idling as if he had done nothing. He pressed the gas pedal to the floor, to no effect. He returned his foot to the brake.

  “The choice you must make is this: you must tell us which of the occupants of these vehicles should be removed from the fabric of existence.”

  “What?”

  “Tonight, one of these human beings will be removed from existence. They will cease to be.”

  “But why?”

  “Why is of no concern to you. Suffice it to say, it is an experiment.”

  “But—but why are you asking me to choose?”

  “That is the experiment,” replied the voice. “Isn’t it? If we were to choose . . . well, it would be pointless. We wouldn’t even be here.”

  “Is this some kind of trick?”

  “Not a trick. A test .”

  “You want me to . . . you’re asking me to pick which of these other people you should kill?”

  “Not kill, Mr. Forrester. We repeat: to eradicate from existence. So that they will never have existed as a living entity at all.”

  “But how—how . . .”

  “You needn’t concern yourself with how, either.”

  “But what you’re asking . . . it’s evil!” The last thing Nate wanted was to provoke this creature—and now, rather than being an alien, he took it to be a demon—yet he couldn’t restrain himself.

  “Evil. Interesting. How so?”

  “How so? These people have families . . . loved ones . . . they might have children waiting for them at home.”

  “Indeed. All factors that you must take into consideration when making your choice.”

  “But how do I know about those factors? I don’t know these people! I can’t even see them!”

  “Try again. What might you tell about them from their appearance? The appearance of their vehicles?”

  Nate peered into his rearview mirror once more, to find that a clear spot like a window had opened in the thick icy fog. Through it, he could now see the face of the driver in the car behind him, illuminated by the unnaturally vivid red light. It was the thin face of a young man, maybe a college student, but with his little ginger goatee and eyeglasses he gave the appearance of being intelligent, maybe even scholarly, not the guffawing beefy frat-boy type. Nate could now see, too, that his car was a silver Hyundai. The front license plate was folded under where he’d once nosed too close to a parking lot barrier. A homely little human detail.

  Tonight Nate had lost more money than he took home working all week, endless hour after hour at a job he despised . . . and now on top of that he was being asked to murder a stranger? Because that was what the creature proposed, no matter how it chose to express it. Nate might as well press a gun to that’s boy’s forehead and blow the back of his head off himself. That young man was a son. He might have brothers and sisters. One day soon he might marry, to father children, whom Nate would be murdering, too. No—no—he couldn’t do it. He was a gambler, and a drunk, and a loser, yes, he could admit to that—a loser at life, not just at cards—but he wasn’t a bad person. He was not a killer . He would refuse to play this game, this alien experiment into human behavior, or devil’s sadistic bargain. He wouldn’t damn his own soul.

  When he looked forward, however, and saw that the creature had shifted aside a bit to afford him a clearer view of the vehicle idling in front of his own, suddenly the decision that was being thrust upon Nate seemed much easier.

  It was a gray Toyota RAV4, and though Nate couldn’t see the driver’s face, he could now make out that it was a woman with longish dark hair. Furthermore, on the rear window was one of those decals that portrayed a family of stick figures, corresponding to the owner’s own family. In this case, an adult man, woman, and two small stick children with smiling faces, like figures a child himself might draw.

  There really was no choice which of the two strangers should be evaporated, was there? This woman already had children. If Nate should indicate that she was the one to be eliminated, it wasn’t as though he would be leaving her children motherless . . . they too would cease to exist, for she would never have lived to give birth to them.

  “Have you decided, Mr. Forrester?” asked the voice through his car’s speakers. “Do you require a bit more time?”

  Another glance into the rearview mirror. No—that boy had been someone’s child once, too. He still was. But if Nate pulled the trigger on him, his parents would never have known him, never have held him as an infant, never have kissed his newborn head. Hung his drawings on the refrigerator. Allowed him into their bed when a nightmare woke him in the middle of the night.

  “What if I say no?” Nate said. Finally his voice sounded less shaky. Sounded like something approaching firmness. “What if I refuse to choose?”

  “Quite simple. Then we will remove both persons from existence—and you c
an go on your way.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Nate hissed.

  “Perhaps you need to give it more thought, Mr. Forrester. Take all the time you want. We are, after all, suspended in this moment.”

  “You want to see how terrible people are, don’t you?” Nate snarled. “You want to see how low we can sink. It amuses you, huh? You smug fuck. You expect it of us.”

  “As we say, the whys and wherefores of the test are not for you to ponder.”

  Nate squeezed the steering wheel so tightly that he thought he might wrench it free in his hands. “How about if I choose you to be eliminated?”

  “We’re afraid that is not an option.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Only the occupants of the vehicles.”

  “The occupants of the vehicles,” Nate echoed, nodding slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “Any occupant of these vehicles I want.”

  “That is the choice, precisely.”

  Nate kept nodding, until a hard little smile came to his lips, and he felt his eyes filming over with tears. “Okay,” he said. “Then I’ve decided.”

  When he told the looming emaciated figure his decision, its voice over the car’s speakers said, “Interesting.”

  *

  Troy sighed irritably. It had seemed like an eternity for the woman ahead of him, in the RAV4, to find the two measly quarters that the man in the booth required for the toll. It had seemed so long, in fact, that he had actually dozed off for a moment. In that tiny span he had dreamed there was another car between his silver Hyundai and the woman’s gray Toyota, but when he’d snapped awake again he saw that this wasn’t the case. Just a second’s worth of dream.

  Finally, the RAV4 pulled ahead to continue off the exit ramp, and Troy rolled the Hyundai up alongside the booth to pay his toll as well.

  Saigon Dep Lam

  The first time Lan saw the angry black man, she was waiting on her motorbike at a stop light. The sun hadn’t yet risen and she was making her daily trip to a nearby street market to buy supplies for her cousin’s little restaurant, where Lan worked as a cook.

  Her cousin Nhu had been taking pity on her when she’d given her the job, Lan was certain, because Lan’s elderly mother had just passed away and her brother wouldn’t do anything for her, but Nhu had also recently lost her best cook and so it seemed a reasonable arrangement all around. Quickly enough, though, Nhu had told Lan how grateful she was that she had taken her on. Lan had lived the first fifty years of her life in Trả ng Bàng, and from that district Lan had brought the local pork soup recipe called “bánh canh Trả ng Bàng,” which had been going over very well with Nhu’s customers. Nevertheless, Nhu had asked Lan to keep herself back in the kitchen out of sight. She didn’t need to tell Lan why. It was obvious that her appearance might be deemed unlucky and affect the diners’ appetite.

  Like the myriad interchangeable women who on motorbike or on bicycle or on foot peddled fruit or sold lottery tickets on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Lan typically wore a floppy cloth hat and covered her face from the eyes down with a handkerchief. Those other anonymous women wore handkerchiefs or surgical-type masks to protect themselves from bike exhaust and the harshness of tropical sun, but in Lan’s case it served also as disguise. Only back in the kitchen, or in Nhu’s home, would she take these accoutrements off. As she was thus outfitted, and with the gloom of pre-dawn masking her further, the black man didn’t so much as glance Lan’s way as he went walking past.

  Foreigners abounded in Ho Chi Minh City. Since the American soldiers had withdrawn, Westerners had been a much rarer sight in Trả ng Bàng, and so Lan had found herself staring at them surreptitiously over the edge of her mask ever since coming to this city. They inspired in her a mixture of feelings, all of them vague. This man was surely no tourist, however. His clothes were too well worn, looking unwashed as well. He wore a bushy beard and a soiled little cap, and he carried a walking stick—though he strutted along the sidewalk with a kind of vigorous defiance, so he surely didn’t need the stick as a cane. Lan suspected it was a visual weapon, to intimidate others into not harassing him. And she suspected he had suffered much harassment in his life. Probably only a few years younger than herself, he was doubtlessly the offspring of an African-American soldier and a Vietnamese woman, and any woman who had slept with an American soldier would be deemed a prostitute, any child of such a union a bastard and outcast. This man’s curse was that he had inherited all his father’s characteristics; from this distance, at least, he didn’t look Vietnamese at all.

  The traffic light changed, and Lan drew up her legs and started forward again. She glanced back at the black man as he stalked in the other direction. He frightened her, because he looked surly, even deranged, but she also felt sorry for him. What kind of life must he have lived these past forty-plus years?

  As she approached the market, already bustling with activity, she had a fantasy that the man she’d seen wasn’t a “con đen lai”—a black half-breed—but an American soldier who had never returned home, choosing to remain in Vietnam. She had heard of such men. But living openly on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, rather than in some rural area, as the stories went? Not likely, and besides, he had looked too young to have been a soldier. It was just that, having lived so much of her life in near isolation, Lan liked to fantasize and embellish stories to entertain herself. She always kept such flights of fancy to herself.

  At the market, despite her hat and handkerchief, she felt eyes crawling across her face like curious ants. Did these people around her think she had no business here, acting like a normal person? Shouldn’t she be begging in the street as the maimed so often did?

  “You have a beautiful eye,” Nhu had told her. It was meant as a compliment, but Nhu’s words seemed to Lan to narrow her worth down to a very small spot. Her other eye was a tough white orb set in the patchwork web of scar tissue that covered most of her face, twisting her lip up tightly so that speaking and smiling were equally awkward. Nhu seemed to think it was Lan’s good fortune that the napalm had left her that one viable eye. But an eye for what purpose? Seeing herself in the mirror? Seeing others steal looks at her on these market excursions? It was the same as when Nhu bragged to her husband, “Lan was the cutest little girl; I wish you could have seen her.” Such a very small spot of her life, those first eight years. Was she even the same person, Lan sometimes wondered, as that beautiful child Nhu referred to?

  Heading back to the restaurant above which she lived with Nhu’s family, her Honda laden with bulging plastic sacks, Lan envied that black man who had been marching down the sidewalk with his stick like a rifle, so fiercely unapologetic. Although, she considered, that was probably due more to madness than to pride.

  *

  Neither Lan nor Nhu were Catholic, but many in Vietnam were, and even Buddhists welcomed Christmas—though it was nowhere near the celebration that Tet, the Lunar New Year, would be next month. Ho Chi Minh City was bedecked and bejeweled for the Western holiday, only days away. Lan had never seen the city before at this time of year and was dazzled. It made her think of the popular song “Sài Gòn đẹ p lắ m”—“Beautiful Saigon”—with its cha-cha rhythm.

  Ho Chi Minh City would always be Saigon to its proud citizens, wearing its imposed name like the handkerchief she wore to hide her scars. As she rode toward the restaurant with her daily haul, Lan reflected on the city’s duality. Assimilated into a unified Vietnam, but inhabited by people who largely still despised the North. Wealthy tourists shopping at the glistening Diamond Plaza and bustling B ế n Thành Market, while homeless child prostitutes hawked their bodies for food and drugs. Unlicensed images of Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh on clothing and school murals more prevalent than images of Ho Chi Minh himself, and what must his statue in front of the People’s Committee Building think of the city lit up this way? Only blocks away from his statue loomed the great Notre-Dame Cathedral, its twin bell towers still outlined in Christmas
lights with dawn not having yet broken.

  The song lyrics were doing their cha-cha-cha through Lan’s mind . . . “Sài Gòn đ ẹ p l ắ m, Sài Gòn ơ i, Sài Gòn ơ i!” . . . when she spotted the black man for the second time.

  In the past few days she hadn’t seen him again, even though she had scanned around for him as she rode her Honda, but she had seen several other monsters in the area instead.

  Because Lan worked long hours, from opening in the morning until closing at night, Nhu had been giving her cousin two days off a week. Up to now, on her days off Lan had kept to the house, cleaning around to help out and treating herself to a little TV: a Chinese costume drama or Korean soap opera dubbed into Vietnamese. She went out only when the city was in darkness, feeling like a ghost—a ghost of an earlier, bloodier Vietnam. But the black man’s unabashed fearsomeness had strangely inspired her to be more bold herself, and this week on her two successive days off she had spent a good deal of time just riding around in the naked blaze of sunlight. It had been a guilty thrill, like going out to meet a secret lover.

  This was when she had seen the other blighted souls. Like the black man, they too appeared on the sidewalks, as if they had come out specifically for her to see them. They were like signposts, Lan thought.

  Sitting on the curb at a street corner, a teenage boy with deformed legs. Lan wondered if the deformity could be the result of Agent Orange. He appeared addled, grinning brightly at passersby like a much younger child. But when she saw him the next day, toward dusk, sitting at the same spot as if he’d never budged from it, he was rubbing at his eyes. Was he tired, sleepy? Were his eyes burning from the long day exposed to glaring sun and vehicle exhaust? Was he even crying? Lan didn’t want to think that, didn’t want to imagine that the people who apparently dropped him off here to beg were in no great hurry to pick him up again.