Terri Windling - [Bordertown 02] - Borderland

by Mark Alan Arnold (epub)

  “Motor-scooter battery,” she told Scooter, returning to him and placing it in his hand. It was heavy for its size. “Used to power one of those Honda Elites. Perfect for you—a Scooter battery, huh?” She laughed. “Anyway, it’s all charged up and ready to use. Just bring it back when you’re done with it, okay? Don’t lose it, don’t sell it, and don’t keep it too long.”

  “I don’t—I don’t have anything I can—”

  She put up both palms and shook her hands. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t cost me anything unless you lose it.” She smiled knowingly. “This here’s a gravy business for me, Scooter. The power’s a fringe benefit from the generator, and they let me use it free, which means it doesn’t even cost me any fuel. My only overhead is electrolyte—I gotta trade with those shitheads who squatted that car-battery shop on Veda.” She shrugged. “So you’re all set. You can do me a favor when I need one.”

  Scooter looked at the scooter battery in his hand. “Well—thanks, Marti. Thanks a lot.”

  She waved it away. “C’mon, I got stuff to do here.” She led him to the door and opened it for him. “I tell ya,” she said as they left the noisy room, “this is a hell of a life, you know?” She locked the door and began leading him to the front of the Factory. “1 ran a garage for ten years before I could get the hell away from it. I came here to make it big. I was gonna be a filmmaker, you know?” She shook her head. “Then all this. And now the best thing, the most important thing in the world I can be, is a goddamn mechanic.” She nodded at Tommy Lee and opened one of the tall front doors to let Scooter out. “Ain’t that a bitch?” Without waiting for an answer she said, “You take care now, Scooter,” and shut the door again.

  It only took a little fiddling to connect the battery to his amplifier. He drank Jack Daniel’s from the bottle while he rigged it up. He removed the Les Paul from its dusty case and ran a hand along its glossy black surface, then set it aside and untangled a cord from a heap in one corner of the studio. He plugged one end into the Les Paul, plugged the other into the amp, and turned it on.

  An electric hum, and then feedback assailed his ears.

  Wincing, then grinning in satisfaction, Scooter moved the guitar away from the amp and turned down the gain.

  He pulled the pick from his mouth and struck a bar chord. For the first time in years, notes sounded from the amplifier of Scooter’s electric guitar.

  It was out of tune.

  Scooter sat on the card chair in the middle of the studio and tuned it. When he was ready, he took another sip of Jack Daniel’s, turned up the volume, and

  played.

  The studio filled with loud music.

  He ran scales, then old riffs, then played with the amp until he got the sort of distortion he wanted. He cranked up the volume until his ears hurt, and played hard and fast—and still he wasn’t satisfied. He needed something else, something more.

  Monaghie.

  It was still early afternoon; he could make it there well before sunset, be back before dark. Sure; that was a good idea. A great idea.

  He opened the back door and wheeled his bicycle outside. He put the Les Paul back in its case, looped the plug on top of it, snapped the case shut, carried it outside, and tied it to the sissy bar with thick elastic cords that had a hook on either end.

  The amp was going to be a pain in the ass. It was about two feet square, eight inches deep, and heavy. He rested it on the support bar beneath the seat, then lashed it to the handlebars with more elastic cords. Steering would be a little more restricted, but he’d manage.

  He put on his black-and-white-checked cotton shirt, the one with the big pockets, left it unbuttoned, and put the Jack Daniel’s bottle in a pocket.

  He set out.

  Scooter reached Crescent Canyon in fifteen minutes— the same amout of time it would have taken him in a car six years ago. He turned right onto Crescent, pedaled another half mile, then shifted to low gear when he reached the long, gradual rise. There weren’t very many cars, and there was plenty of room to avoid them.

  When the road began to curve and the route grew steeper, he walked the bike up. At the top he turned right onto Monaghie.

  Monaghie Drive wound along the top of a line of hills, the unofficial line separating here from there, a kind of thirty-eighth Parallel dividing the human city from what lay beyond. All roads sloped down past here, leading deeper into the Borderlands.

  There weren’t a whole lot of people who went farther than Monaghie. Scooter never did.

  On Monaghie he found he had exercised hard enough to come perilously close to sobriety, he fished the bottle from his pocket, uncapped it, and drank. From here the route wound up and down as well as back and forth. Scooter coasted on the downslopes and walked the upgrades. The final stretch, just past the fringe of an abandoned planned community called Crescent Hills, was long and steep, rounding a tight corner banked by a rise that was the knoll where Scooter usually played. Scooter took the guitar and amp to the top of the rise, leaving the bike behind on its kickstand. He didn’t lock it; he had forgotten to bring the lock. Once he nearly slipped trudging up the sandy rise, but he recovered and reached the top.

  He set down the guitar and the amp and looked out over the valley. The wind whipped his hair across the left side of his face. It was clear up here; most of the smog had died away some time ago, though there was a thin haze of gray to the west, where the hills still burned. The bare dirt rise on which he stood was littered with wrappers, bags, cans, bottles, even a rotting chair, color bleached away by the sun. Scooter looked out over the urban grid in the valley and remembered how it used to be. A Friday night, maybe, driving along the twisting road, at points seeing the city below him, spread out and winking in the dark like looking out from inside a chandelier, and, sometimes, the moon rising, a gibbous orange impaled by a distant peak. Monaghie would buck left, surge right, hungry gravel chewing beneath his tires while, behind, the impatience of close headlights. And he would feel he catwalked a wall separating halves of the world, and he would wonder if anyone else saw it that way.

  Now Monaghie separated two worlds in truth, but the fairyland was on the other side—a much less inviting sort of fairyland—while the winking lights that had once been a testament to technology were now limited to a few isolated pockets.

  Scooter shook his head, looking out over the still city. Everything changes, he thought. He said it aloud, and felt his eyes sting. Goddamn you, Roxanne. How could you do this?

  He bent, unsnapped the guitar case, and lifted out the Les Paul. Sunlight reflected along its glossy black length, reminding him of the eyes of the boy he had seen up here the other day. He set the amp on a concrete survey marker that had dept, of public works stamped into it, plugged one end of the tightly coiled cord into the Les Paul, plugged the other end into the amp, and turned it on.

  A slight hum grew in the afternoon air.

  He sipped Jack Daniel’s, then set the bottle down by his foot. The sun was an outstretched hand’s length above the horizon.

  Scooter slung the strap over his right shoulder, bent to the case again, and selected a pick—a Fender Bullet. He straightened and looked around, feeling the wind in his hair, the sun’s warmth on his face. He took a deep breath and let it out.

  With a middle finger he damped the strings and plucked a harmonic.

  A dozen feet away, a bright point arced in the air above his head. It faded quickly, leaving an iridescent afterimage that dissipated quickly.

  He plucked harmonics. Pairs of crescents floated in sequence, then faded in the gilded light. They were similar to those that formed when he brought the Martin up here, but brighter, more vibrant, more energetic.

  More electric, he thought, and strummed a G-chord.

  An arpeggio of light swept upward, each distinct bar its own color, graduating up the spectrum from red to orange, to yellow, to green, to blue, to indigo, to violet, fading to nothing but a shimmer in the air.

  Scooter grunted.
So much for the pretty stuff.

  He drank again from the bottle, set it down, adjusted treble and bass on the map, added a touch of reverb to fill it out some, and turned up the volume. He turned to face the valley. “Let’s give this a try,” he said, and began hammering triplets, wailing in the narrow frets near the body. The notes were piercing, slightly distorted, raw-edged.

  Violet points beat in a triple-descendant pattern like the measure of a triple heartbeat, dripped down bloodlike, faded where they dripped.

  Scooter turned up the volume and jammed. Raw notes emerged staccato, flickered above him in corresponding machine-gun bursts. Angry bar chords sent murky walls of light sheeting across the space before him. Long, keening, vibrating notes appeared as trembling, diamond-bright points that left flashbulb arcs behind, the color that burns against the eyelids when a dentist’s drill slips and grinds into unnumbed nerve. Playing rapid scratch on muted strings sent bars of chrome yellow racing one after the other, disappearing into the wherever.

  And the music was like before, like in the old days when he carried that anger around all the time, when he and the rest of Stormtrooper would get fucked up beyond all recall and go out there in front of thousands of the motherfuckers and just do it, just jam like nobody else could.

  Scooter smashed a final chord, held it, watched the angry cloud of light dim slowly as the chord dwindled, watched it disappear as it died.

  His back teeth had grown numb from the whiskey. He reached for the bottle, knocked it over with a foot, picked it up awkwardly, leaving behind a small puddle in the dirt. “Shit,” he said, and wiped the mouth.

  He drank.

  “All right,” he muttered, left hand on the neck of the bottle lowering to his side, right hand muting strings around the neck of the guitar. “All right, Roxanne.”

  The sun touched the hills at the horizon. An arc of light reflected from his guitar, quivered at the foot of the rise, swept scythe-like across it as Scooter heaved the bottle away. “All right!" he bellowed.

  The bottle hit dirt with a hollow sound, but did not break.

  Scooter adjusted the strap on his shoulder. He fingered the neck and struck a crashing chord. “Roxanne!” he yelled. “You hear me down there? This is for you! This is for you, Roxanne!”

  And he began to torture music out of the guitar. It was ugly, jarring, violent, fast, discordant, raw, enraged, hungry, primal, seething, laced with pain.

  Above him the air churned, the colors roiled.

  They grew. From electric brightness the colors dimmed to a boiling palette of reds and browns like dried blood, of funereal grays the color of slug bellies, of dark, dull blue-greens like bread mold, of deep oranges like rust and decay.

  They acquired a look of solidity, of tangibility. The look blurred with Scooter’s tears.

  Molded by anger and loss, shaped by pain and loss, the colors took on form. Immersed in the cathartic of his playing, Scooter did not notice as the form began to pulse with a dull, leaden kind of life while it seethed and turned about and lowered a smoky length of itself toward the hillside.

  He stopped playing when he heard the coyote screaming. Not howling, not baying, not yiping, but screaming— open-throated, helpless, unable to escape pain beyond imagining.

  Scooter stopped playing.

  He looked at the thing dipping into the brush, the thing created by his rage, by his music, the thing that persisted well after the last notes had died away. It had hold of a wild coyote and was somehow draining it of life.

  All around him, in the hills, coyotes and wild dogs began to howl.

  Scooter watched, not knowing what to do, as the coyote leaped out of the brush, twisting, snapping, spasmodic. It was trying to get at something it could not combat, an opponent nowhere visible to it, and as Scooter watched the coyote grew weak and fell over, panting, head toward him, tongue flopping from the side of its mouth onto the dirt, eyes beseeching. Scooter gripped the guitar tighter, then let go.

  Cacophony from the amplifier behind him.

  The coyote was sinking in on itself. The thing above pulsed as it—as it fed. The coyote whimpered now as it grew gaunt, as its ribs grew cage-like, its neck arched and corded, its legs brittle, its head little more than a skull. Its eyes grew madly wide as the skin tautened. Scooter could not look away from them. The eyes rolled wildly as the graying tail flopped, as a gaunt hind leg kicked feebly, then fixed on Scooter, and he watched the light in them fade until it was gone.

  What remained was coarse-furred parchment stretched over bone.

  The howling continued in the hills.

  Scooter looked up at the thing his music had made. He could feel it, was in some way attuned with it.

  And what he felt was hunger. Hunger, rage, violence, pain, a need for satisfaction that was a primal scream of yearning.

  His hunger, his rage, his pain, his need.

  The smoky tendril lifted from the dessicated husk that, not a minute ago, had been a living animal.

  Deep within the thing, a redness pulsed.

  Scooter backed up a step as the thing rose in the air. His calf swept into the amp, knocked it over, sent out a grating screech of feedback. Scooter glanced at it, looked quickly back to the thing.

  It drifted toward him.

  He ducked out of the guitar strap, dropped the guitar (crash of open notes and howl of feedback, sustained cry of a banshee), fled down the slope, slipped on gravel, slid, tumbled forward, came up (pant leg torn, gravel scraping open the flesh at the side of the knee, just like Dennis, just like him), looked back over his shoulder—

  It came over the rise, dark and wanting.

  —looked away, ran for his bike, swung cut leg over banana seat, tried to pedal away but couldn’t—

  The kickstand, goddamn, the kickstand!

  —reversed the pedals, nudged the kickstand up with his heel, and pedaled down the long incline as fast as he could.

  He looked back over his shoulder. It was there, and gaining, this impossible, frightening mass of dark light following him down Monaghie Drive. Scooter leaned forward and put his back into it. The wind flung back his hair, hurled dirt in his eyes. He was doing forty miles an hour by the time he stopped pedaling and leaned into the first curve. The back tire jolted on a pebble; Scooter nudged the bike to compensate, fought for control, won, and resumed pedaling down the slope.

  The curves here were gentle, the slope less steep; there were no cars and few obstacles in the road. Scooter hurtled past abandoned Crescent Hills on his right, the Canyon Overlook on his left. He wanted to look over his shoulder to see if the thing was still there but was terrified to look away from the road at this speed. One branch, one patch of gravel, one section of crumbled asphalt, and he would go down and not get up.

  His palms were slick on the upturned handlebars.

  He was cold sober now. Fear had chased away the alcohol; instinct and epinephrine won out over Jack Daniel’s.

  He negotiated the gentle curves, still pedaling, still accelerating in his downhill flight, the city spread out below him. He was panting. His chest felt constricted, as if the muscles were reluctant to work. Red tinged the edges of his vision.

  There were cars and tight curves coming up in a few hundred yards, and he knew he had to slow down. He squeezed the right handbrake, but at this speed it had little effect. He squeezed tighter, heard it hissing behind him, then gripped the left brake.

  He slowed.

  Rounding a sharp left bend, he glanced back.

  It was ten feet away.

  He gasped, turned back, put on a fresh burst of speed—his thighs were tightening now—leaned as he rounded the corner—

  —and hit gravel. He felt the back tire go out from under him and knew there was no way he could recover. He turned the handlebars a little to the left and “stood” on the pedals, riding the bike in a power slide. A rusting Porsche with smashed-in windows loomed ahead of him; he let go, straightened, and “walked” off—left foot coming off the peda
l to brace him, right still firm, the sole of his left shoe skidding a few feet on the pavement, gaining purchase, and he let the bike slide away from him. He fell, rolled, hit his back against the rear tire of the Schwinn as it rammed into the Porsche, and felt his insides lock up as the wind was knocked out of him. Mouth working like a fish out of water, Scooter tried to force himself to take in a breath.

  He tried to get up as the thing neared, but couldn’t. He scrabbled back as he watched its approach, thinking to squeeze himself beneath the car.

  It swept by him and continued down the road.

  Even in his pain and fear Scooter could feel it—a brush of presence against his mind. It wanted, it hungered.

  Something relaxed and Scooter took in a rasping breath. Wincing at the pain in his back, he forced himself to stand and stepped away from the bike. He looked down the road and caught a glimpse of the thing as it rounded a corner, moving slower now.

  Feeling numb, he went back to the bike, pulled it away from the Porsche, and examined it. The left pedal was bent, the handlebars were slightly askew, and the tape was scraped away on the left side. He rolled it and looked at the wheels; they were unbent. He’d gotten off lucky.

  Scooter began to tremble violently and felt his eyes brim with tears. He shook his head rapidly, fighting for control. It’s gone, he told himself. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.

  But he had felt it brush his mind, its presence like a tumor, and he knew what it wanted.

  It wanted Roxanne.

  He thought of the coyote collapsing inward as it was drained of life, the light fading in its eyes, the pain in its scream.

  And he had made this thing, had created it with the rage of his music.

  Scooter’s eyes widened and he felt another pang in his chest.

  What you make belongs to you. That old man—he’d known. He had tried to warn him, but Scooter had been too ignorant to listen. And in his ignorance he had made this thing, the product of rage, of pain and loss, the embodiment of a need that wanted only to be filled.