“We should see what the others are doing.” Molly said. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“In a minute.” I rolled back onto my stomach. “You took the sauce out of me with that one.”
Pleased, she lay down in the grass, nudging against my shoulder and hip, and went to braiding grass blades together. She stretched a hand out beside mine, as if comparing the two in size and pallor, then rested her head on her arm and said, “Let’s stay here tonight.”
“Where?”
“I saw a couple places back in town.”
“Too expensive.”
“We don’t have to find a place, we can stay awake all night.” She rolled over and grabbed a baggie from a purse, showed it to me—it held a quantity of white powder and, in a little plastic bottle, a rainbow confection of pills. “We have this,” she said, and shook the baggie, making it rustle.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I don’t care.”
She pitched her voice low in imitation of mine. “‘Whatever. I don’t care.’”
“I don’t.”
“It’s all so depressing.” She threw herself down in the grass and pressed her forearm to her brow, as if overborne by the world’s brutishness. “Whatever. I don’t care.”
There were five of us that day and, it seemed, all our days. Molly, me, TK, James, and Doria. We traveled in a small, disheveled pod, when we traveled at all, and we liked to ride the driverless white buses that trundled up and down the coast, controlled by electric cells along the road. Often we rode them to Droughans Beach. I had stolen a tool from a repairman’s kit that enabled me to open a panel on the floor and control the stops and starts. If there were other passengers on board, they would ask to be let off, and so we stretched out across the seats, scrawling our names (though not our true ones) and affections on the windows and walls, shouting, and pissing in the aisles, knowing that by the time anyone responded to the signal sent by the wounded bus, we would be off into the next chapter of our vandal’s tale. We were none of us eighteen (I had almost reached that defining age), living in a city squat with half-a-dozen of our peers, surviving by means of stealing, prostitution, and panhandling, and these little excursions were the height of our criminal joy. We could all tell each other the same true stories of abuse, deprivation, rape, but there was no point to it, so we told one another the same lies, an equally pointless and dissatisfying exercise, but more fun. We lived to lie, we were professional quality liars, and the finest lies we told were the ones we could not help believing ourselves.
Close to where Molly and me lay, a wooden stair led to the beach, descending in two tiers past boarded-up cottages, though not so ruinous as the one on the clifftop. Near dusk we climbed down the stair, a precarious route due to broken steps and a rickety railing, and out onto the sand. Droughans Beach was approximately a hundred fifty yards wide at low tide and stretched unbroken for nine miles. The sand was so fine that when Molly slid her bare feet along it, she produced a distinct, musical tone. Facing the stair, a fragment of a giant’s fossilized jaw thrust up some thirty feet from the shallows, gone a dull grayish green with age; two worn teeth of the same color, a molar and a canine, showed clear of a light surf—it had been lying there for so many centuries, it had blended with the landscape and might have been mistaken for a natural formation. To its right stood a massive rock over two hundred feet high, shaped like the giant’s ancient tool shed, its peaked roof topped by greenery that sprouted from a thick layer of birdlime left by the gulls and puffins that roosted there in the thousands. That evening, water foamed around its base and waves broke over its sides, sending sprays into the air; once the tide receded, however, you could stroll out almost to its seaward end and keep your shoes dry.
Molly ran off to find our friends among the thirty or forty people who were walking the beach, and I hunkered on the sand close to the tidal margin. There was scant wind where I sat, but it was blowing hard atop the rock—the gulls went off-balance as they landed, beating their wings to stay level, getting one foot down and tottering before they settled on their perch. Their distant cries sounded like a baying of tiny, trebly hounds. The landward face of the rock looked to have been sheared away down to a skirt of rough stone that spread out from the base; inscribed thereon, covering a quarter of its surface, was a great design of whitish lines that, although it, too, might have been a product of wind and weathers, revealed the aspect of the embryonic creature that had been sealed within the rock centuries before. I thought about that half-liquefied monstrosity, left to mature in the solitary dark, and wondered what shape it had taken, and whether it had grown to the limits of its prison or been stunted and deformed by the blackness.
I sat there for what seemed an hour, my thoughts plunging to places as black as that prison and soaring into bright fantasies wherein Molly and me, TK, James, and Doria, all our friends in the city, lived in a circumstance with good health and good food and drugs enough never to know a vengeful feeling or bloody desire; and then I lay down in the sand, not because I was sleepy, but because I was oppressed—it was as though a hand, irresistible in its power, were pushing me onto my back, I was so overcome with hopelessness, with the understanding that our fates already had been decided. As surely as I saw that design of white lines left by the ancients to warn against what was sealed within, I also saw lesser lines that described Molly beaten by a trick, TK overdosed, James done in by an untreated disease, Doria with her throat cut. All still young, still wanting life. The only death I could not see was my own, but I felt it closing around me.
Eventually I did sleep and when I woke it was dark. Most of the strollers and shell collectors had left the beach, and Molly and the rest, made visible by moonlight, were gathered around a boulder that the tide, receding now, had left bare. I was angry at them for letting me sleep and I walked toward them, brushing sand from my clothes, thinking how to express my displeasure. They were talking to an old man in a plaid cap and shabby clothing. He was holding a battery lamp that, now and then, he switched on, underlighting the others' faces and his own as he shined it over the pool. I could tell they were screwing with him. TK, with his rabbity bones, a few hairs on his upper lip playing at being a mustache, still a boy; James, sullen and muscular, yet half-a-head shorter than I; and Doria, her hair part-blond, part-blue, with a bitter, sexy face: they, and Molly as well, each wore sober looks, as if intent on what he said, but I knew they were repressing their derision.
“When I was no older than you kids,” he was saying, “I was on patrol down here.”
“You were a cop, huh?” asked TK.
“Oh, no! I was part of an environmental patrol. The town hired seven of us kids to make sure no one disturbed the tide pools. We’d catch someone sitting on the rocks, like you were doing, and we’d tell them they were sitting on living creatures.” He played his light over the boulder. “See there? Acorn barnacles and tube barnacles. Anemones. Tiny ones. If you look close you can see ‘em poking out their tongues.”
“For real?” said Doria. “Sitting on them might get a girl off, huh?”
James said, “Why seven?”
The old man acted confused; he glanced at James anxiously.
“Why’d they hire seven?” asked James with studied thickness. “‘Cause it was like a magic number?”
“It was just for the summer,” said the old man weakly.
“Did you guys call yourself something?” asked TK. “Like did you have a name? The Seven . . . you know. Whatevers.”
“Beachmasters!” suggested Molly, provoking laughter from James.
“Assbags!” Doria looked to the group for approval, but no one found her remark funny.
“We weren’t . . .” The old man blinked, licked his lips. “We . . .”
“Suppose you saw someone doing this?” James went tromping, splashing through the tide pool. “What would you do? Blow your little whistle?”
“I’d probably fucking kill you,” I said.
The old man shined his lamp full
on me.
I threw up an arm to shield my eyes and said, “Turn that damn thing off!”
For the reaction it brought, my voice might have been a roar. The old man dropped the lamp into the tide pool and stumbled back against TK. I shouldered past Doria and said to him, “You know this an evil place. Especially at night.”
He stared fearfully at me, one red-veined eye rolling like a horse’s, a horrible, unlucky thing, and I told him to look away from me. When he had done so, I put my mouth to his ear and said, “Suppose you’re here when the beast breaks loose? It would tear you apart.”
He started to turn his head and I said, “Don’t look at me!”
I laid a hand on his back—he was trembling—and told him to go. His trembling increased and I repeated my instruction. “Go now,” I said. “Or I won’t be responsible.”
He took an unsteady step. I spanked his bony rear, setting him into a hobbling run; the others hooted and laughed.
“Shut the hell up,” I said.
They fell silent, except for James, who said, “Fuck you! Who made you God!”
“I thought we cleared that up last month,” I said. “Those ribs heal all right? That tooth still giving you trouble?”
I won the staredown and, to cover his shame, he bent to pick up the old man’s lamp.
“Leave it,” I said. “It looks cool.”
And it did, it made the pool appear sacred, green watery radiance streaming up.
“Why were you bashing that old fart?” I asked.
“We weren’t going to hurt him,” TK said.
“You know how it goes. You start off fucking with somebody, just fooling around, and it gets out of control. Someone takes a bite and the feeding frenzy’s on.” I sat on the boulder, unmindful of dying anemones. “We’ve all got wicked tempers and it doesn’t take much to make us snap. That’s how we hurt ourselves. Right, James?”
“I guess,” he mumbled.
“Consider it a lesson,” I said. “Why waste your anger on someone whose pain can’t profit you? You have to conserve anger, nourish it. Like the beast. Imagine when it gets out, how strong it’ll be. All those years with no place to vent . . . except on itself. It’ll be strong enough to break the world. You need to be that strong.”
Doria laughed nervously.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“Hey!” she said. “It’s just you talk so much shit, man, I can’t keep it straight.”
“You have to think,” I said. “You have to decide what you need to survive and use your anger to take it.”
They listened, but I detected boredom in their faces. They were too inured to my words to hear them. Of them all, only Molly displayed the wit to survive, and even she looked bored. I continued to lecture, hoping that sheer repetition would put the brake to their course of self-destruction. I told them to muzzle their whims, to devote themselves to strategies that would sustain them. And yet the more sense I made, the more certainly I lost them. They had begun to view me as they would another species. Soon I would be as irrelevant as the old man.
After I stopped talking, Molly distributed the pills. She offered me none, knowing that I would abstain. Drugs brought me perilously close to the source of my rage. The others wandered off along the beach, but I remained seated on the boulder. The light from the pool made me feel like a wizard who had, by means of some occult process, opened a portal beneath his feet into a bright submarine continuum, and, having used up the pleasures of this world, was contemplating a dive into those uncharted waters. I pictured myself as a shadow raised against a greenish glow, a demonic figure in a Buddha’s pose.
The battery lamp had fallen into a niche in the rocky bank and nearby rested an anemone that had the approximate size and oblong shape of a woman’s coin purse. It was a fancy thing, pale jade in color, beaded around its outline with what looked to be dark green florets. I was tempted to reach down and grab it, but feared it would be unpleasant to the touch or sting me with its acids. Best to imagine it in hand, I thought. Smooth and firm, a living stone. On the bottom, a crab no bigger than the joint of my thumb was negotiating a rise between two collapsed strands of kelp. I stared into that shallow depth with such intensity, it seemed I became a citizen of that savage, tranquil place.
When I was fourteen I struck my father in the face, putting an end to a decade of torture both mental and physical. The blow raised a lump the size of a hen’s egg above his right eye, swelling up instantly, but had a more lasting effect on me. Frightened by what I had done, certain that he would call the police, I ran to Spetlow Hill and climbed the church tower (it was then under construction), and there I spent the night huddled under a tarpaulin, gazing out through a skeleton of masonry and steel at the tumbled roofs of the town and the listless ocean beyond. God knew me now, I thought. I had violated one of His taboos, no matter it had been in self-defense. His fierce eye had marked me. Yet when I recalled my father on his knees, clutching his injury, I felt a vicious satisfaction and joy. It was the best feeling I’d ever had and I wanted it again. I wanted to piss God off, I wanted another bloody victory. If I returned to home, I believed he/He would kill me, and so, after stealing clothes and some money, I fled to the city in search of that feeling. I never found it, but I found lesser feelings that sufficed. Amazing, how impotence itself can be rendered impotent by the sound of someone groaning in an alley or the impact of a boot on bone.
For nearly four years, I brawled and bullied my way through life. Not that it was all a triumph. Many nights I made my bed in an abandoned factory or railroad yard, beaten and degraded, terrified by every indistinct sound, by the rats that nested there; but I became, at last, the king of my own rats’ nest. And now I felt the world pulling me away from childhood, from my hard-won sinecure. Even as I had lectured my brother and sister rats, recognizing they would suffer without my guidance, I was envious of their state. Seeing them at play on the beach, zooming about, falling to their knees, puking up the poisons they had swallowed, then vanishing into the dark, I felt love for them; but love was an emotion they did not respect and so, to honor their feelings, I dismissed them from my thoughts.
The tide had gone out. I walked toward the rock, scrambled up the skirt of rough stone, and found a spot where I could sit. It smelled of ruin, like a drowned cathedral in which the vestments and candles and incense had rotted away. The waves broke against it less vigorously than before, but cold sprays still spattered me with shrapnel bursts and my face grew numb from this constant booming assault. And yet I felt secure, sheltered by its darkness, as I had felt when, after a beating, my father would lock me in a closet and forget me for the night or longer—I thought that the beast, even in its desperation, must feel similarly secure. I tried to isolate its scent from the greater smell of the rock, the stink of the silent birds in their black nests.
Molly flitted past on the sand, pursued by another, less defined figure, both going out of view behind the rock. The sight gentled my thoughts, giving rise to a memory. I had stolen a car from the parking lot at the mall, punched through the glass and hot-wired it, and the five of us tore out onto the interstate. Molly had called shotgun and, as I drove, she leaned out the window, shrieking, her hair flying, flashing her tits at the people in slower cars. She must have resembled a ship’s figurehead stuck on sideways and come to life, yet they looked at her with dull, unsurprised faces, as if every day of their life they were blessed with such insane beauty, or else this was something their television sets had warned them against and thus they were prepared to put up a stolid front. I could have written songs about their stuporous response.
Darkness closed down, a light rain fell, and once we turned off the interstate onto Highway 26 things grew quiet inside the car. James, sounding paranoid, asked where we were going, and Doria fired up a pipe, and TK was getting all film-geeky about a movie we had seen, pointing out flaws in its logic, saying that the metal tripods had been buried in the rock for millennia, withstanding a million tons of pressu
re, okay? So how come Tom Cruise could blow one up with a grenade?
“Because he’s Tom Cruise, man,” said Doria, trying not to exhale. Talking caused her to hack up smoke. “Shit!” She handed the pipe up to me, nudging my shoulder, leaning so far forward that I could feel the bristle of her dreadlocks (she had since changed her hairstyle) on my neck.
Molly snatched the pipe from her and that was good with me. I was high on crime and violence. Whenever a car rushed toward us, its headlights dazzled the raindrops decorating the windshield and it would seem I was driving into rings of fairy light; then darkness would swallow the road, a curving two-lane slicing through a spruce forest, and I had to refocus in order to steer. I needed to come down a notch and I told Molly to look out for a place where I could buy beer, explaining that I was having some difficulty.
“You can’t see?” She laughed merrily, delighted by the prospect of my blindness.
“Want me to drive?” James asked. “I can drive.”
“Fuck no!” I punched the gas, accelerating to shut him up. James could be a real pisser. His parents were religious zealots and that was most of his problem.
Molly switched on the radio, found a station playing rock and turned it high, putting an end to conversation. She rolled down her window and played with her tongue stud, popping it in and out between her lips like a little gemmy bubble.
Twenty miles down the road we came to a convenience store with carvings for sale off to one side, gigantic things made out of stumps and fallen logs, animated by magic. It had stopped raining. Puddles like shiny black eyes dappled the gravel lot. I went inside, bought beer, stored it in the car, all except a forty, which I cracked, and went over to where my friends stood, checking out a huge fir stump that some redneck necromancer had carved into a troll that kept walking into its cave house, casting a sour look back over his shoulder before shutting the door, then backing out and repeating the process.
Nightmare Magazine Issue 4 Page 5
