* * * *
That was almost thirty years ago, I say, uselessly. A lot of water under the bridge since then.
There no time, the stone man says.
Indeed, he has not changed at all. If he is truly alive, he does not age.
You are ready, then?
Yes. I have done a terrible thing.
* * * *
Somehow I found my way back home. I must have arrived a while after my father came home from work, because I discovered him sitting amid the ruins of our trashed living room, staring at the heavy-calibre pistol on the floor and at the brains and blood splattered all over the furniture and walls. My sister was sprawled head-first down the front stairs. My mother lay right in front of Dad, curled up as if she were asleep.
He was weeping uncontrollably.
He never noticed that I was naked and wet and half frozen, or that I was burned where either the stone man or any of the winged ones had touched me. I stank of sweat the way you do when you’ve shivered really hard. When I tried to say something it came out as a weird, trailing howl. Lights glared and whirled all around the house, blinding me, and the sounds were all strange and distorted, people talking to me at the wrong speed, all growling and distorted, like the voices of broken machinery. Maybe there was blood running down my cheeks. One of my eardrums had burst. I’ve been partially deaf in that ear ever since. The house was spinning, shifting, and nothing made a great deal of sense. My feet hurt intensely from where they had touched the stars, as if I had been wading ankle-deep in the burning sky.
In the end, guess what? Somebody really did wrap me up in a blanket like a little baby and hand me a cup of hot chocolate.
Yes, I did time in institutions after that, in high, red-brick prisons where you have to wear pajamas all day and night in the company of crazy people who think you are one of them, where the bright lights are always on and there is no darkness, except what you can carefully, secretly nurse within yourself, despite the best efforts of so many cooing and clucking Professionals to gently probe you with words and drugs and Get To The Root Of Your Problem. They want you to confess, confess, confess, as relentless as any Inquisition, their pretend-gentleness as insidious as the rack and the thumbscrew.
Confess.
Yet I held out. I hoarded my secrets. Eventually, for lack of evidence or lack of guilt or lack of interest, or maybe something as mundane as lack of continuing funds, after many stern lectures about how I was apparently devoid of all normal human emotions, I was cast up at eighteen, an orphan, shipwrecked and alone, onto the shore of the Real World to make my way in it.
The rest is fraud. Imposture. With darkness in my heart, with my secret cunningly concealed, I gained, at first, marginal jobs and marginal acquaintances, and learned to impersonate a human being, going through all the motions of “normal” life, becoming so convincing in my falsehood that I even managed to marry Marguerite, a much more accomplished person than myself, and to father a daughter by her, whom we called Anastasia, whose name means “resurrection,” as in the resurrection of hope.
But it was all just one more part of my plan. Another part was that we had to leave our native Pennsylvania, and by cunning degrees I eased us into the necessity of moving the entire family to Arizona.
It spooked them. No doubt about it. A place of vast emptiness, where there are immensities that no one from the East can really comprehend, and you can easily go hundred miles at night between the last gas station and a truck stop, seeing absolutely nothing in between. A little town like Page perched on a hilltop with its stores and green lawns seems like a whimsical speck of paint on an otherwise completely empty canvas. Ten miles down the road can be as barren as the Moon. I took Marguerite to see the Grand Canyon by starlight, and she was terrified of its vastness even as I wanted to leap out and swim into its abyss, in which there was no up or down and no distance, where infinity is very close, and at its heart swirls the black chaos whose name may never be spoken.
* * * *
You came to me.
I knew the way.
An awakening, into darkness.
Yes. Because I have done a terrible thing.
Then listen.
And we both listen. It makes no difference that I am partially deaf in the real world, because this is a sound from out of the immensity of the darkness. We gaze down from atop a remote mesa over a desert landscape that stretches off into black nothingness, without the light of a house or a highway or any glow on the horizon to suggest that mankind has ever set foot on this planet—from out of that distance and that darkness, from beyond the squat, round hills that are visible only because they block out the starlight, comes a howling which I have indeed heard before and have never stopped hearing all the days of my life, a sound now human throat ought ever to be able to utter.
You hear it? my companion asks.
Yes, of course.
In such places, in the darkness, we are closer to the outer spheres. Dimensions, gateways, whatever you want to call them, touch.
Do other people hear this?
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.
We stand in the darkness, gazing into the farthest distance, and for an instant the stars seem to be rippling, as if they’re a reflection in a mirror-smooth pond and something has just gone skittering over the surface.
My companion takes my hand, as he did that first time, in the dark. It is a surprisingly human, tender gesture.
The howling sound is all. It fills the universe. I cannot hear anything else. I cannot speak or hear, and we two reply, joining an impossible chorus even as the presences close in around us, and I feel their wings beating against me like the wind. Their claws or hands or whatever it is they have tear at my to-be-sloughed off flesh as they seize hold of us and lift us into the air, off the top of the mesa, sweeping over the landscape, into the stars and the darkness beyond.
I am still able to touch the thoughts of my companion and converse with him after fashion that is not speech, except perhaps the speech of dreams. His words form inside my mind, as if they are my own.
* * * *
This is my tragedy, I come to understand.
I have done a terrible thing, but not terrible enough.
For a while, during the years of my imposture, I didn’t feel like a damned soul at all. It was very beguiling. Marguerite awakened within me emotions I did not know I even had. We were happy. When our daughter was born, it was a joy. She taught me how to laugh, something I had not done in a very long time.
* * * *
That must be sloughed off.
* * * *
I had a life.
And I lost it.
Again.
I have done a terrible thing.
* * * *
It is of no matter. Such things do not exist in the dark.
* * * *
But what if I can’t slough it all off? What if the condition of nihil is only incompletely achieved? What if, in the end, my sin is a very petty and human one, a routine mixture of cowardice and prideful despair?
* * * *
Now the stars swirl around us in a vast whirlpool, and then there are more dark dust clouds whirling, obscuring the light, and we pass through, borne by our captors, for I believe that is what they are, the ones to whom we have surrendered ourselves. Once again the ice-plain stretches below us, beneath the black suns, and the enormous stone visage looms before us, and the stone jaws grind and the stone throat howls, speaking the names of the lords of primal chaos, and of the chaos itself which cannot be named at all.
* * * *
I have done a terrible thing.
History, family history, has a way of repeating itself, and the sins of the fathers are visited, etc., etc. but not precisely and not the way you think, because the terrible thing was simply this, that at the end of many long and happy years together with Marguerite, she began to leave me, not because she w
as unfaithful or wanted a divorce, much less because I blew her brains out with a heavy-caliber pistol or induced her to do the same to herself. More simply, she developed brain cancer, and after the seizures and delirium and withdrawals into hospital wards, where I last saw her hooked up to monitors and tubes like a thing, not the person I loved, who had taught me, quite unexpectedly, how to be human—after I no longer had the courage to visit her or whisper her name, I looked into the darkness once more, and remembered all those strange things from my youth, and my companion, my mentor, my friend with the many funny names I’d made up for him and no name at all, was waiting for me as if no time had passed at all.
* * * *
Cowardice and despair. How terribly, disappointingly human at the last.
* * * *
Falling down from out of the black sky toward the immense thing which is more of a god than anything imagined in human mythologies, I realize that my only crime is that I am a liar, that I claimed to be ready for this journey when I am not, that I have not managed to slough off my humanity at all; that if anything I have suddenly regained it.
I call out to my companion. I speak strange words, like a apostle babbling in tongues. I ask him if he is my friend, if he has been my friend all my life. I tell him that I have a name, which is Joseph. I ask him his own name, and somehow I am able to press into his mind. I catch glimpses of his life and learn that he was an astronomer who worked in in Arizona about 1910, named Ezra Watkins, and he too has some deeply buried core of sorrow, a secret pain that he is terrified I might uncover and force him to confront before the darkness can swallow him up utterly and forever.
He draws away from me in something very much like panic, shouting that these things must be gotten rid of, discarded, sloughed off—the phrase he uses over and over again, chanting it like a mantra—and I can feel his immeasurable, helpless, despair as memories of his discarded humanity begin to awaken within him.
He begins to scream, to make that unbelievable, indescribable howling noise, and for once I cannot join him in his song. From out of my mouth issue only words, like a little boy’s voice, not loud enough to be heard, breaking, shrill.
Consternation among our winged bearers.
This one is too heavy. He is not pure.
They let go of me. I am falling from them, through space, burning among the stars, blinded by light, away from the stone god, away from the black suns and the swirling dark.
I call out to Ezra Watkins. I reach for his hand.
But he is not there, and I can feel my ears bleeding.
* * * *
Maybe my daughter Anastasia inherited my alleged total lack of human emotions, because she disappeared about the time her mother became ill, and I never heard from her again; but I am, alas, a very poor liar, which is my single crime, of which prideful despair, cowardice, and self-delusion are mere subsets, what I have failed to slough off.
I alone have escaped to tell thee.
* * * *
My eyes do not glow. That is an illusion. In the dark, there is no light.
I wait. I have walked too far in the dark spaces. I have waded barefoot among the fiery stars and the black stars and burned myself. I cannot walk upon the Earth again, but only wander in the darkness, howling.
* * * *
The Christians say it is the howling of a damned soul. The Native peoples, who have been here longer, have other, older ideas.
They’re both right.
* * * *
Nobody is going to make this better with a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate.
Now that you have come to me, you must tell the story.
PEELING IT OFF
I
“It’s a matter of life land death,” Sam Gilmore said, and I believed him.
I had to. It was something about his intensity, the way he said it, the way he leaned over the table and stared right through me, the way he had begged me to meet him now, tonight, here in a ridiculous East Village bar called the Yuppie Upper—despite the lateness of the hour and the foul February weather.
But I was his friend, so there I was. We went back a long ways together, to childhood, and in a city as huge as New York you cling to anyone who isn’t a stranger.
I glanced around at the decor—everything that the name of the place implied, a hideous caricature of the young-and-loaded image, clashing Neo-Fifties chrome, Neo-Thirties Art Tacko, a whole wall dominated by a Warholesque portrait of Marilyn Monroe in pale green—and reflected that in other circumstances this would be one of Sam’s little jokes. We would both be laughing now.
But even before I’d sat down, when I found him in a back booth nursing the remains of some tall drink that came with a pair of cheap sunglasses wrapped around the stem of the glass—even then I could sense that something was terribly wrong. Sam could try to be silly to stave off the most wrenching despair, but it never worked and it wasn’t working now.
I stood there in front of him, shaking the water off my coat.
“Sam, Goddamnit, this had better be good.”
And then he went very pale, and his lower lip was trembling. I thought he was going to break down then and there.
“It’s about Joanne.”
I sat down. A waiter came over. I ordered a whiskey sour just to get rid of him. “Sam,” I said. “You’ll have to get over her. You’re divorced now, like God knows how many other people. Something a lot of people have learned to live with.”
“It’s not just that. I’ve discovered I—”
I tried to be as firm as I could without upsetting him. “I hope you aren’t going to say you still love her. It’s a bit late for that.”
He sipped his drink. The straw made a gurgling sound.
“No, Frank,” he said. “Quite the opposite. I have discovered that I truly hate her.”
“Put that out of your mind,” I said. “Just forget it. That kind of thing can eat you, like a cancer.”
He toyed with his glass, twirling it in his hands.
“You haven’t been there, Frank. You don’t know. It was actually a comfort to realize, at last, that I hated her. It. wasn’t just the culmination of a long process of insults and tantrums, rejections and sneaking unfaithfulness, though it was all those things. It wasn’t even anything like Poe’s ‘thousand injuries of Fortunato,’ but some vast and inexorable force working on me, like tectonic plates grinding inside my mind. And then, when I knew that I hated her, those plates were in place, and there was no more grinding, and I felt only relief.”
“This is sick. It’s bad for your head. So quit it!”
“I wish I could,” he said. “But, you see, I didn’t call you here tonight just to tell you about my little miracle of self-discovery. No, it’s something else, something I’ve done.”
“Something you’ve done?” I felt the first tiny shiver of fear then.
“Will you listen to all of it? Just listen? Be a friend and—?”
“Yeah, sure, Sam. I’ll listen,” I said. “Because I am still your friend.”
He ordered another drink. It wasn’t a silly one either, just whiskey and soda. He sat quietly for a while, sipping it. The bar was completely empty now, save for us and one waiter. The music had been turned off. I could hear the faint soundtrack of the television in the far corner.
“I went to see Joanne again, two days ago,” he said at last. “She’s still in the old apartment. I went there, and, you know, for a few minutes I couldn’t bring myself to go up. I just stood in the lobby. But then I saw the label on her mailbox. It said JOANNE GILMORE, 4D. She hadn’t even gone back to her maiden name. For a second I wondered if it might mean there was one final tie she refused to break—but then I dismissed the possibility it could mean anything at all. It was, instead, the final straw. I hated her just a bit more then, and it was enough.
“I took my time walking up the stairs. My heart was racing all the while. When I rang the bell again and again at 4D and there was no answer, I was only too ready to leave. I
was looking for an excuse, an out.
“But then there was movement inside. The peephole flickered.
“Joanne opened the door a few inches and peered out. She was in a bathrobe and slippers, her hair up in a towel.
“‘Sam!’ she all but hissed. ‘I told you never to come here again! Do you need a fucking court order?’
“‘But I wanted to see you, dearest,’ I said. I rammed my shoe in between the door and the jamb, then put my shoulder to the door and shoved my way inside.
“That was more than she had been expecting, even after everything that had happened between us. She just stood there, her hand to her mouth in amazement. I closed the door behind me and turned toward her in the narrow hallway.
“‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ She was furious, but whispering. There has never been anyone else who could put such venom into a whisper. ‘Get out of here before I—’
“‘Before you scream?’ I grabbed her by the shoulders and slammed her against the wall, holding her there. The towel started to come loose. She jerked her head to get it out of her eyes. ‘No one will come,’ I whispered back at her, ‘even if they can hear you. This is New York, home of the late Kitty Genovese, remember?’
“She was getting scared by then, I could tell. But she controlled herself. Her voice was icy calm.
“‘So now you’re here. Now what?’
“‘I just wanted to talk to you again, Jo—’
“She was almost crying then. ‘There’s nothing left to say. Just leave me alone and get the fuck out.’
“‘Profanity, my dear, is the last recourse of the fucking inarticulate, and you were never inarticulate, so why talk to me like that?’
“I reached up to gently caress her cheek, and she slapped my hand away with real repugnance, as if were covered with lice or something. That hurt. That, more than anything else, strengthened my resolve.
“‘My God,’ she said, in tears now, shaking allover. ‘Your barging in here like this only makes me sure I did the right thing getting rid of you. If I ever had any doubts about you being a creep and an asshole, I don’t now.’
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 39
