The End in All Beginnings

by John F. D. Taff

  Praise for

  John F.D. Taff's

  The End in All Beginnings

  "Of the current breed of authors riding the wave of digital liberation, John Taff is a standout talent. Literary, affecting, chilling, and indicative of that old-school mentality meets new-school daring. You need look no further than this collection for evidence that not only is horror not dead, there are new proponents of the craft more than capable of carrying it into the future."

  —Kealan Patrick Burke, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Turtle Boy, Kin and Jack & Jill

  "The End in All Beginnings is accomplished stuff, complex and heartfelt. There's an attention to character and an access to feeling that's very refreshing indeed!"

  —Jack Ketchum, World Horror Grand Master and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Closing Time, Peaceable Kingdom and The Box

  "Taff brings the pain in five damaged and disturbing tales of love gone horribly wrong. This collection is like a knife in the heart. Highly recommended!"

  —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Code Zero and Fall of Night

  "The End in All Beginnings is a powerful collection that journeys through the darker side of life's loves and losses. Past anguish and pain, into realms of repercussions and oblivion."

  —Rena Mason, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Evolutionist and East End Girls

  "The End in All Beginnings gathers five emotion-packed novellas from the insightful pen of John F.D. Taff. There is a circular, almost dreamlike quality to much of the material, owing to Taff's elegant, often poetic descriptions. They mark out undiscovered country from the religious nostalgia of childhood, to psychological, demented—even monstrous—love gone awry, all the way to the realm of the dead. This collection belongs on the shelf of any true horror connoisseur."

  —Aaron J. French, Editor-in-Chief of Dark Discoveries magazine and author of Aberrations of Reality

  "One of our most emotionally engaging and endlessly entertaining writers has offered five wishes to you and all the other rabid readers in the world. Read The End in All Beginnings and get them granted. Taff's mastery is such that he can as easily induce déjà vu in a nightmare you've never had before, and stir your guts with Twilight-Zone panic. Taff has the rare literary confidence and narrative skill to decide where you will feel what. It's his choice alone."

  —Erik T. Johnson

  "With The End in All Beginnings, Taff sketches a fresh blueprint in the canvas of existential horror, classic sci-fi and post-apocalyptic realness. Taff doesn't rely on pretense to get his words into your mind; he relies on natural talent, then laces it with a poet's wit to keep you engaged, focused, but most of all, satisfied. He shocks us as much as he makes us laugh and cry."

  —J. Daniel Stone, Author of The Abscence of Light

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This collection is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS

  ISBN 978-1-940658-29-2

  First Grey Matter Press Electronic Edition

  September 2014

  Copyright © 2014 John F.D. Taff

  Design Copyright © 2014 Grey Matter Press

  All rights reserved.

  Grey Matter Press

  greymatterpress.com

  Grey Matter Press on Facebook

  facebook.com/greymatterpress

  To my grandparents, Robert and Anita Taff and Floyd and Margaret Graham. I knew you for too short a time—and one of you not at all.

  WHAT BECOMES GOD

  OBJECT PERMANENCE

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF ZOMBIES

  THE LONG, LONG BREAKDOWN

  VISITATION

  Author's Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  More from Grey Matter Press

  PROLOGUE

  Was it two? Or three?

  I’m just not sure anymore. I can’t be sure of that.

  I have dreams where there are just two, normal size, at the front, set up on biers.

  I have dreams where there are three, two normal size, one to either side of the smaller one in the middle.

  I’d like to believe there were actually three.

  Believing that there were only two means…means…

  * * *

  There was a time when I believed…in a lot of things.

  But no more.

  Belief is a terrible thing. It demands sacrifice.

  Once, I was a child, and I believed, and I sacrificed a thing of beauty for the thing I loved most, my best friend.

  And it bought me nothing.

  Nothing, that is, except disbelief.

  Here it is, then, if you want it, if you can see it.

  If you will take it.

  * * *

  First I believed I could catch the moon.

  I hadn’t been asleep long when the moon exploded.

  I’d entered sleep roughly that evening, pounding my pillow into submission, thrashing the covers until they could fight me no longer.

  When sleep finally came, though, it was indifferent, a familiar lover’s torpid kiss.

  And the dream came with it almost immediately.

  I stood on the deck of my house. Only it was the house I’d grown up in, the house I’d been born into. That house never had a deck. Being back was enough to awaken in me some dim spark of loss—of childhood, home and family, whatever pain it might have caused me in my youth. Perhaps the fog of years or the acceptance of age dulled my mind to the sting of such memories.

  Sighing heavily, I reached forward, grasping the rough-hewn railing of the deck I never knew and looked up at the silver-white light of the moon, impossibly big and full above me.

  I had touched the moon one childhood evening.

  Or, rather, I’d tried.

  That early summer’s evening, I had tried to catch the moon, trap it in a jar like the king of all fireflies. I had raced through the weed-choked empty lot behind my house for hours, leaving my father slumped in his easy chair, a pile of beer cans slouching at his feet, a half-lit cigarette slipping from his drooping hand.

  My mother was gone on one of her countless errands—shopping or playing cards or having dinner at one of her friends’ houses—all of which, I know now (and was dimly aware of in this dream) meant she was out with one of her lovers. One of the men who showed up frequently at the house during the morning or afternoon—always while dad was away—to “fix the sink” or “unstop the toilet” or “work on the furnace.”

  Together, they’d disappear for hours, and return sweaty and disheveled.

  It would start when my dad returned home—the yelling, the throwing, the rage that echoed from the dingy walls of our small place until…

  But that one evening, I’d felt larger than it all—as big as an eight-year-old boy can feel. While I rested in the field, munching on the crushed remains of a cheese sandwich I’d fixed for dinner, my breath rasping in my lungs, an empty jar sitting amiably beside me, I believed I could catch the moon.

  I believed.

  Or maybe I wanted the moon to catch me, to seal and take me away in its own glass jar, still smelling faintly of whatever condiment was used on the moon.

  While I rested there, my older sister, Marcia, came crashing through the tall grass.

  “Wh
at the fuck are you doing out here?” she asked.

  I saw the inexpertly rolled white cylinder in her hands disappear behind her bare back, where a single roll of baby fat still curved innocently from between the short hem of her t-shirt, the low waist of her torn, tight jeans.

  All of fifteen, she was already smoking pot and getting laid and thinking about moving on to, perhaps, heroin or LSD and communal living and free love. Marcia had come out here alone to smoke, still fearing the anger of our parents, however fossilized and impotent it might appear.

  And I could tell she feared what I thought, as well.

  How strange, I realize now.

  But with this also came the realization that she hated me with a loathing that reminded me of the secret looks my mother sometimes gave my father.

  “I’m trying to catch the moon,” I breathed, stale crumbs of bread flaking from my lips, one dirty hand stroking the smooth glass of the jar.

  She stood with her mouth open for a moment, not able to laugh or speak. Finally, “You’re a fucking retard. Just like the old man. Must run in the entire fucking family,” she spat, hurtling each word forward like a striking snake.

  With that, she turned away, strode farther off into the field, farther from me.

  I never saw her again.

  From what little my parents said about her afterward, I gleaned that she’d run away, hitched to San Francisco, joined some group of hippies. She died three years later, when I was eleven and she only eighteen, of a heroin overdose.

  My parents didn’t bring her home to bury her, didn’t go there to attend the funeral. Later, when I was in high school, some acquaintance of hers told me that her friends had buried her with flowers in her hair.

  He laughed as if this was some black joke, watched my uncomprehending face, shook his head.

  My dream-self remembered all of this, but particularly how close the moon had been that heavy summer evening. It had seemed possible, really possible to touch it, to capture it.

  I believed it.

  How would it feel, I wondered, to run my hands along its grey ridges and dead dry scarps, to feel the impression of its craters beneath the tips of my fingers?

  While I considered reaching out to touch it in this dream, it burst asunder like the husk of a dried, desiccated fruit.

  There was a tremendous flash of light, painful even with closed eyes. I threw my hands up to ward it away, but it did no good. It penetrated flesh and bone and mind in one gigantic, formless pulse of light before it faded.

  And it left a horror in its absence.

  Where there was once one round face in the sky, there were now thousands, millions of jagged pieces, twirling and spinning in the darkness like fragments of a shattered mirror, each glittering the same argent as the former whole.

  The space between these whirling shards was filled with jagged arms of purple lightning, and silvery faery dust, and the plumes of myriad explosions.

  A moment earlier, and I felt I could reach out to stroke the face of the moon.

  No more.

  The vast space between the Earth and moon was magnified by the streamers and debris that filled the sky, seeming to come closer and closer, but never able to reach Earth.

  And I realized through the mist of my dream, through the veil of years that separated the me of years and years ago from this me, realized how ridiculous this childhood dream was, this belief.

  No one could touch the moon.

  No one.

  * * *

  He was dying even then, I know now.

  Dying not in teetering steps as old men die, but in great bounding leaps. As children gulp Kool-Aid on a summer day, he was taking death in, gulping it down, swallowing it whole. Not missing a drop.

  And the Kool-Aid Man says “Oh yeahhhhh!”

  Part of me feels anguish at the fact that it took so long for me to notice. The pale skin. The deep-set, bruised eyes. The thin arms and legs, as spindly as a monkey’s. His lack of energy, of strength. He could never keep up with me. Couldn’t run as fast or as long, climb as high, jump as far.

  I never noticed. Well…that’s not true. I did notice, but not until very, very late.

  I think, though, that perhaps it was better that way. I never treated him any different, never looked to the days ahead—days very probably without him—and mourned his loss.

  How that would change.

  * * *

  The frogs were Charlie’s idea, not mine.

  A few months before the sixties ended and the seventies began, we watched a man with the curiously Hollywood name of Armstrong walk on the moon in grainy, choppy black-and-white images on the hideous console TV in my mother’s living room. Charlie and I sat in enthralled silence, shoving handfuls of popcorn into our Kool-Aid-stained mouths, our hands greasy on the carpet.

  “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up,” Charlie said, his voice startling me. “I want to walk on the moon.”

  I laughed, imagining the other astronauts having to lean against boulders, pausing while Charlie caught his breath, or having to carry his backpack because he was too weak.

  My mother, seated on the sofa behind us, stiffened.

  “Brian!” she hissed.

  She was alone, as she was often those days. My dad had walked out about a year before, and his absence—and the death of my sister just a few months earlier—left my mom deflated and listless. I could tell that she thought she was supposed to have been the one to leave, not him. When he left, though, either she lost interest in other men or they lost interest in her.

  Though I didn’t understand her reaction, I bit back my laughter, turned to Charlie.

  I saw it in his eyes.

  Defiance.

  I shrugged, stuffed my mouth with popcorn and watched Armstrong bunny hop across the grey powder of the very moon that I had tried long ago to trap in a mayonnaise jar.

  I wondered if I would be able to see his footprints from down here.

  * * *

  In my memory, the summers in my hometown of St. Louis were hotter and more humid than they are today. So much for global warming. The heat and the weighted air were oppressive, thick enough to take effort to draw into my lungs. My hair wilted, sweat positively fountained from my pores. The air was so sodden that I became wet simply moving through it. Clothes adhered to my skin like hot towels in a sauna.

  And that’s in the shade! as the joke goes.

  Water boiled from the air, yet was constantly replaced from some source I hadn’t yet learned about in school.

  Under my feet, the pavement became a griddle. Going barefoot was out of the question. The tar cementing sections of the road together wept onto the concrete, bubbled like black lava. Grass died in hours on lawns that weren’t continuously watered.

  The sun lasered layers of skin off my forehead, my exposed shoulders, the tips of my nose and ears.

  No one wanted to be outside under that sun in those suburban, early seventies summers.

  Except us kids.

  Not that my friends and I had much choice. My mother, like most of the moms on the block, fed me breakfast early in the morning—as early, anyway, as she could drag me out of bed on a day with no school and no Saturday morning cartoons—packed my lunch, ushered me gently but firmly to the door, where I’d hear two things before being almost literally pushed out.

  First was the warning not to bother her during the day, but be sure to be home for supper.

  Second was the door locking behind me.

  Getting back in the house—the coolly air-conditioned house—was possible only through visible blood, broken bones (again, visible) or imminent danger of an embarrassing al fresco bathroom incident (if you were a boy, only No. 2 would gain you access; either, if you were a girl, but only grudgingly).

  There were other distractions, sure. Kickball, whiffle ball, hot box. Riding bikes to the local Quick Shop for candy or sodas or comics. The ice cream man’s regular visits, announced by those tinkling bells that jangle som
ething primal deep, deep within every child’s DNA.

  Following the mosquito fogger, running behind it or riding bikes, breathing in the dense, grey billows of smoke the contraption—usually perched in the bed of someone’s truck—belched out. It smelled of gasoline and something lighter, headier and slightly botanical, but not in a good way. Like how some weeds smell when you crush them in your hands and they bleed out their thin, white sap. That I haven’t died yet, after years of avidly inhaling that mosquito fog, still frankly surprises me. Who knows, though? Maybe it inoculated me against cancer. From what I can recall, the mosquitoes certainly never seemed to suffer from it.

  We also had the woods.

  We were in the woods that morning. Each in t-shirts and blue jeans cut down into shorts, clutching a brown paper bag with lunch inside. Canteens filled with Kool-Aid sweated at our hips.

  My mother had been even more distant that morning, sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of black coffee. She didn’t say anything when I came into the room, made myself a bowl of cereal with the last of the milk in the refrigerator, didn’t even look at me.

  She seemed guarded, wary. There was a strong sense of fear that wafted from her; fear that I would say something to her, require her to do something for me.

  Feel something for me.

  I left without her saying a word to me. She didn’t even tell me to be home for dinner.

  Charlie, in contrast to my sullen, distracted mother, was very animated that morning. His hands moved as he talked, spots of color burned on his pale cheeks. His fish-white legs scissored back and forth, his head pivoting as if on a swivel.

  It looked to be a good Charlie day, which, even then, was becoming rarer and rarer. I thought we might even make it to the creek before he needed to rest.